A normal person comes home and finds their home flooded with sewage. That person will pump the sewage out and clean the house. Not 0bama, he will raise the ceiling.

Via The Hill

GOP strategists are urging restraint in the upcoming debt-ceiling fight.

They are excited by the prospect of reclaiming the Senate in November’s midterms elections but anxious about the party’s capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as amply illustrated in recent campaign cycles.

Congress must vote to raise the $17 trillion debt ceiling sometime in February or March. In the past, Republicans have looked to extract
major concessions, such as dollar-for-dollar spending cuts.

The strategy bore fruit in 2011 when President Obama, with an eye toward securing reelection, signed the Budget Control Act, which included $2 trillion in cuts.

But now the president is refusing to negotiate on the debt ceiling and the GOP is still feeling the reverberations from a 16-day government shutdown in October that wreaked havoc on the party’s public approval while reaping almost nothing in exchange.

That has many in the party looking to go small this time around, arguing that the top priority must be locking up electoral gains in November. Those gains, they say, could pave the way to the attainment of many big policy goals.

“What Republicans have to realize [is] the political winds are in our direction. We can’t risk changing the winds at this stage,” said GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak. “You can shut down the Obama agenda completely if you have the Senate.”

A GOP decision on the debt ceiling is likely to come out of the annual House retreat scheduled for Jan. 29 in Maryland. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has told Congress he expects the government could be in danger of missing payments by early March, giving lawmakers a narrow window to find another borrowing boost.

“The only way you lose the House is if Dems intercept a Hail Mary pass on the debt ceiling,” another GOP strategist said. “If you lose the House, you open the door to everything.”

At the same time, GOP tacticians acknowledge that the party cannot look weak in the debt ceiling fight and simply grant the president the “clean” hike he wants. Furthermore, the timing of the fight means members facing conservative primary challenges will face a tough dilemma.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in December that the party would not accept “nothing” for the debt ceiling and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he could not imagine a clean increase.

Tea Party and outside conservative groups said this week they are still formulating their approach. Feisty outside groups have helped pull congressional Republicans to the right in several past battles, but they came under intraparty criticism — most notably from Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — for pushing the GOP into the ill-fated shutdown fight over ObamaCare.

With the debt limit looming as the next battleground, conservative forces are still looking for a policy win, but are not drawing any lines in the sand.“