Now that the Republicans have settled on Kevin McCarthy as the Speaker of the House, they have to pass a rules package. The Associated Press reports that this won’t be a slam dunk, although the odds are that they’ll get in done. As I’ve been warning about ever since it became common wisdom that the Republicans would win back control of the House of Representatives, we’re now in a crisis because Speaker McCarthy can’t operate under the proposed rules and have any hope of raising the debt ceiling or passing realistic appropriations bills to keep the government operational in the next fiscal year, which begins on October 1st. Any future funding for Ukraine is also in grave peril, as I predicted.

If you lived through the debt ceiling crises of the Obama presidency, much of this is going to be painfully familiar. However, this time the crises will be more difficult to resolve in part because forced austerity is about to be codified in the House rules.

But first let us look at the White House’s position.

The White House has rejected Republican calls to slash spending in return for an increase in the federal government’s borrowing authority. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre went so far on Sunday as to call House Republicans’ likely demands “hostage taking” that would risk default, an event that could trigger an economic crisis.

“Congress is going to need to raise the debt limit without — without — conditions and it’s just that simple,” Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One as President Joe Biden flew to Texas. “Attempts to exploit the debt ceiling as leverage will not work. There will be no hostage taking.”

This is incompatible with what McCarthy agreed to in return for votes from the 21 Republican members who initially refused to back his speakership. According to Vox, the precise language is “We will not agree to a debt limit increase absent a discretionary budgetary agreement in line with the House-passed budget resolution or other commensurate fiscal reforms to reduce and cap the growth of spending.”

As for the Republican budget, McCarthy pledged to cap “discretionary spending where it was during the first fiscal year of the Biden administration” while creating a balanced spreadsheet within ten years. To do this, they will enact “”long-term reforms” to mandatory spending programs (entitlements like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid).”

The effort to cut entitlements isn’t necessarily tied to the debt ceiling since it impacts mandatory rather than discretionary spending, but holding discretionary spending at 2021 fiscal year levels after all the inflation we’ve experienced would represent cuts too severe for either the U.S. Senate or the Biden administration to contemplate. For defense hawks, it would also represent a cut of $75 billion from the current level.

The debt ceiling crisis will happen because McCarthy’s Speakership was bought on the promise to take an impossible line on the debt that precludes any compromise.

A similar dynamic will play with the appropriations bills that fund the government, as Vox explains:

In recent years, Congress has tended to fund the government by running up to the deadline where previous funding bills would expire — which would mean a government shutdown — and then passing either a “continuing resolution” extending status quo funding levels for a time or one massive “omnibus” bill funding the whole federal government (as just happened last month). Spending hawks in the GOP hate this practice, and they want to put a stop to it. But they know they don’t have unilateral power to do so, because Democrats control the Senate and Biden controls the presidency.

McCarthy’s proposal, then, is that the House would not pass any Senate appropriations bills that don’t comply with the House’s own budget resolution. That is — they’re saying Democrats must cave to their demands on spending levels. Democrats will not want to do this, so if they stick to it, it probably means a government shutdown.

Eventually, the Republicans may conclude that they’re losing the political battle over a government shutdown with Biden and seek to submit, but McCarthy also promised three slots to right-wing hardliners on the Rules Committee, which would make it impossible to move a bill to the floor without Democratic support. And that gets to another concession McCarthy made.

If McCarthy violates his spending agreements in a way some conservatives dislike, they’ll have a way to put him through the wringer.

For most of its history, the House gave any one member the power to file a privileged “motion to vacate the chair,” which would force the House to vote on whether to depose the speaker. Hardly anyone ever used it, but when then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) filed one to try to push out Speaker John Boehner in 2015, it helped contribute to Boehner’s decision to resign. Democrats then greatly weakened this power when they took over the House in 2019, requiring not just one member but half of a party’s members to advance this motion.

Conservatives wanted to roll back this change, but McCarthy was initially reluctant to fully do so, offering instead to require five members. After losing his first few speaker votes, though, he gave in and said he’d let one member do it.

At any time, the hardliners can rescind their support for McCarthy and force new elections for Speaker, and they’re likely to do this if this rules package passes and then McCarthy decides he needs to use Democratic votes to avoid a national default or end a government shutdown.

More immediately, there’s a question of whether McCarthy will survive the day if the rules package fails to win approval on Monday. The hardliners reluctantly gave McCarthy the gavel on Friday night despite their suspicion that he cannot be trusted to keep his word. If the promises he made are immediately rejected by the rest of the Republican caucus, they’d have to believe it was all part of a double-cross. And they could immediately move to vacate the chair and force new votes for a new Speaker.

For this reason, the agreement will probably pass even though many in the GOP caucus have deep misgivings about at least some parts of the deal or where it is likely to lead.

Finally, on Ukraine, that’s been a consistent theme on the hard right which is filled with Russophiles, admirers of Vladimir Putin’s Christian chauvinism and the MAGA horde that is still mad that Trump was impeached over his delay of military funding to Ukraine.

Jim Jordan of Ohio is typical in this respect.

Jordan argued that “everything has to be on the table” when it comes to spending cuts, including in defense, in light of the government’s $32 trillion debt. “Frankly we better look at the money we send to Ukraine as well and say, how can we best spend the money to protect America?” he said.

One talking point among the Republican opponents of McCarthy’s speakership was that he wore a Ukrainian flag on his lapel and should wear only an American one. I noticed this come up repeatedly including from people who were calling into CSPAN on the Republican line.

Much like Trump, everything the hard right does seems to be at least roughly consistent with what Putin would want, whether it’s creating a rift with NATO by holding up funding for Ukraine or vastly trimming military spending or raising doubt about the legitimacy of our elections. This is not a coincidence, although the causal relationship is not an exact line.

All of these things are going to come to a head. The first test is the Monday’s vote on the rules package. The other tests will come somewhat later but they can no longer be avoided.

I have stated repeatedly that the result will be that our debt gets paid, the government gets funded at levels acceptable to the Democrats, and that Ukraine continues to get robust support, but this will only be accomplished when the current majority caucus in the House succumbs to a bipartisan caucus that is in favor of sanity. I hoped that caucus would exert itself preemptively and elect its own Speaker to begin this Congress, but I never saw that kind of wisdom as likely to play out.

Now we just have to hope it plays out before the House Republicans cause irreparable damage to our foreign policy and relations, our credit-rating, and the global economy.