Nobody in Washington is talking about the debt ceiling this week, and that is precisely why it deserves attention. Most of the pre-election chatter about what a Democratic House could do to rein in Donald Trump’s misadventure in Iran revolves around war powers resolutions, subpoenas, and hearings. Not surprisingly, all three run into the same wall, a presidential veto that a new majority will not have the two-thirds votes to override.
There is, however, one lever that no president can veto, and it will land in the lap of the new Congress next year. That lever is the debt ceiling.
The arithmetic is quite simple. Gross federal debt crossed $40 trillion on August 18, while the ceiling Congress raised in July 2025 stands at $41.1 trillion. The Bipartisan Policy Center expects the Treasury to hit that limit between late winter and mid-summer of 2027, and the National Taxpayers Union puts its central X-date in February 2028, just as the presidential primaries kick off.
A war powers resolution needs Trump’s signature to become law. Raising the debt ceiling needs the House to vote, and a vote withheld cannot be vetoed. For obvious reasons, this is where the temptation will begin.
The Iran war gives the Democrats every reason to act as soon as possible. The Pentagon put the cost of the campaign at $25 billion in April and $29 billion in May. By Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own July testimony, it had reached $37.5 billion, with a $67 billion supplemental request on the table. The administration wants a $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, has already called any extra war funding request “beyond the pale.” With a base simmering with anger over a war that voters rank among their top three issues, some Democrats are likely to propose a simple bargain: no increase in the ceiling without a cap on Iran spending.
Ironically, it was Jeffries himself who in 2023 called the Republican version of this tactic a “ransom note.” The record of those ransom notes is not pretty. Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating in August 2011 after one such fight, Fitch did the same in 2023 after another, and Moody’s removed the last triple-A in May 2025. Each round of this circus ended with the bills being paid, but each one left a permanent dent in the price of American debt.
This is the pricking point that Washington rarely discusses: the cost of a debt-ceiling standoff does not stay in Washington. Foreign investors held $9.29 trillion in Treasuries in June, and the yield on that debt is the benchmark against which governments and companies across the developing world price their own borrowing. When Treasury bills maturing near a projected X-date trade at a discount, as they do in every standoff, the ripple drives up borrowing costs from Jakarta to Nairobi. Countries that had no say in Trump’s war, and no vote in America’s midterms, would end up paying a risk premium for Washington’s domestic imbroglio, on top of the fuel bills the war has already inflicted on them.
A Democratic standoff would also bury an assumption that has quietly sustained the dollar’s global role, namely that debt-ceiling theatrics belong to one American party and the other party always ends them. Once both parties play that game, default risk becomes a permanent feature of the American system rather than a Republican habit, and lenders from Tokyo to BrasÃlia will price it accordingly.
None of this means that Democrats should throw in the towel on ending the war. It means that they should pick weapons that hit the White House rather than the world’s poorest borrowers, and three are available.
First, the outgoing Congress sits in a lame-duck session until January 3, with Republicans still in charge and Trump on record wanting the ceiling gone, so Democrats should help suspend the limit through January 2029, or repeal it outright, and take the hostage off the table before anyone is tempted to use it. Second, the battle should be fought where the Constitution places it, in appropriations, line by line, through the supplemental the Pentagon still needs; a House majority can refuse to fund the war without threatening to default on anyone. And third, the new committees can use their subpoena power to force a full accounting of a war whose price tag the Pentagon has already revised upward twice since April.
The limit of this argument should be stated plainly. Appropriations fights are slower and less dramatic than a default deadline, and a president who went to war without asking Congress may well try to shift money from elsewhere in the Pentagon budget. But a slow weapon aimed at the right target is still better than a fast one that hits bystanders.
If the lame-duck Congress calls it a day and breaks for Christmas with the $41.1 trillion ceiling intact, the next default scare is already on the calendar, due just as the 2028 primaries begin. Democrats will then face a choice between ending a war and endangering the world’s borrowers, a choice they could certainly have avoided this winter.