We’ll refrain from deliberately sabotaging the global economy, Speaker John Boehner and the other leaders said, if President Obama:
 
Allows more oil drilling on federal lands.
And drops regulations on greenhouse gases.
And builds the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
And stops paying for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
And makes it harder to sue for medical malpractice.
And, of course, halts health care reform for a year.
       
The list would be laughable if the threat were not so serious. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause a default on government debt, shattering the world’s faith in Treasury bonds as an investment vehicle and almost certainly bringing on another economic downturn. Unlike a government shutdown, a default could leave the Treasury without enough money to pay Social Security benefits or the paychecks of troops.
       
The full effects remain unknown because no Congress has ever allowed the government to go over the brink before.
 
The Government Accountability Office estimated that simply by threatening to default in 2011,
 
 Republicans cost taxpayers $1.3 billion in higher interest payments
 
      
Any sober-minded lawmaker should realize that the danger of trifling with the debt limit is far too high. But Mr. Boehner has been encouraging his members to toss their pet projects — hey, let’s insist on Congressional approval for every major federal regulation! — onto the towering list of demands.
       
By day’s end, many Republican members remained skeptical of the leadership plan. But the House leaders clearly hope the president will take the bait and negotiate on a few items on the list, forcing him to break his promise never to bargain over the debt ceiling. Many items on the list are intended to put vulnerable red-state Democratic senators on the spot should the plan wind up in their chamber. One of them, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, said Thursday he could support a year’s delay on health reform. If the unified Democratic opposition to the debt-ceiling threat is shattered in the Senate, the pressure on Mr. Obama to come to the table would be intense.
       
But the absurdity of the list shows just how important it is that Mr. Obama ignore every demand and force the House extremists to decide whether they really want to be responsible for an economic catastrophe. He made a mistake by negotiating in 2011, hoping to reach a grand bargain; that produced the corrosive sequester cuts.
       
To prevent the House from making every debt-ceiling increase an opportunity to issue extortionist demands for rejected policies they can achieve in no other way, the president has to put an end to the routine creation of emergencies once and for all by simply saying no.
 
 -from the N.Y. Times editorial board.

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