John Boehner wants to restart the debt-limit debate. This is big news. Remember all the fun we had last time: threats, brinkmanship, wobbling financial markets, torpedoed Grand Bargain? You can certainly understand why he misses it.
The weather’s getting nice. Maybe this time we could do it outdoors.

“Let’s start now!” the House speaker said during a “fiscal summit” in Washington on Tuesday. This is an annual event in which honchos from all political persuasions get together and agree that the national debt is too big.
We are getting into election season, people. We are going to be hearing a lot about the national debt. (Which is very big. Really, at that fiscal summit meeting they were totally in agreement on the bigness.)
The partisan division — and the key to this entire election — is whether you believe that taxes are a critical tool for putting the budget in balance. If not, then we have nothing to talk about. Meet you in November. Once we see who wins, we’ll deal with the debt.

Fortunately, Congress does not actually have to raise the debt limit again until after the elections. But Boehner insisted in a CNN interview that “there’s no reason to wait” because it’s just a matter of “both parties getting together.”
Maybe we could have a special bipartisan committee come up with a plan. I really liked the supercommittee. And remember all the fun we had with Bowles-Simpson?

The names could definitely be better, though. Let’s call the next one Skippy.
“Everyone knows what the menu is. It’s just about having the guts to choose ... what you’re going to have for dinner,” said Boehner, whose only personal preference is for meals entirely devoid of the dreaded Revenue vegetable.

In other debt-developments, Boehner met with President Obama on Wednesday to discuss what will happen when the debt does hit its next limit. This may happen around Christmastime, and I, for one, am really looking forward to all the lump-of-coal-in-the-stocking jokes. During the get-together, the president reportedly suggested that for once Congress just raise the ceiling like a normal legislature. The speaker’s confidantes reported that he was brave and strong and mildly profane about going for drama and cheap thrills.

In still other debt-related news, the Senate failed to agree on a budget plan despite multiple proposals the Republicans helpfully came up with to slash spending, curb entitlements and lower taxes. During a six-hour debate, the minority denounced the debt (which is very, very big), while the majority party members sat around sullenly. The high point may have come when Senator Mike Lee of Utah announced that “this is the greatest civilization the world has ever known.” Nobody disagreed with him, although that was probably not the best time to make the argument.

The Democrats have not passed their own long-term budget plan for several years. This is either a terrible sign of the poisonous partisan state of things in Washington or an indication that when it comes to things that you really, really need in this world, a Congressional budget ranks somewhere between a hurricane and another debt-limit debate.

To be fair, Congress did pass the Budget Control Act, which, absent any other debt-reduction agreement, will go into effect early next year and automatically slash the defense budget and domestic spending while eliminating the Bush-era tax cuts and that temporary payroll tax cut. This plan is affectionately known as “falling off the cliff.”

There is quite a bit of disagreement about how bad a thing it would be to fall off the cliff. In a Bloomberg News interview, Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, seemed to feel as if it might be sort of like bungee jumping. (“It is quite possible that we go over the cliff but only for a very short period ...”) Others, like Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, have a more negative attitude. (“It makes no sense to get even close to that cliff.”)

Meanwhile, and even more national-debt-related news, Mitt Romney made a major speech in which he laced into President Obama for adding “almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.” This is a much-repeated factoid whose shock value is matched only by its extreme inaccuracy. As The Associated Press noted afterward, the public debt has gone up about 50 percent since the president took office while “under Ronald Reagan it tripled.”

It was a pretty dramatic speech, which compared the debt to a raging prairie fire. Romney said he would extinguish the blaze with his spending and tax-cutting plan, which the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated would, at the very best, do nothing whatsoever.
Only 25 more weeks to go.