“The president has made clear this bill has no chance of becoming law.”

“It is DOA, plain and simple.”

Those two quotes are from Karine Jean-Pierre and Chuck Schumer, respectively. Suffice to say Kevin McCarthy’s debt ceiling bill, which made it through a hopelessly divided House by the slimmest of margins late Wednesday, isn’t a serious proposal.

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be, and notwithstanding eleventh hour concessions to secure the votes of Republican holdouts, most of the specifics were known last week. Democrats aren’t going to slash domestic spending by more than 20% in exchange for one year (at best) of borrowing capacity. That’s silly.

The sole purpose of the vote was to prove that House Republicans are capable of legislating, and to finally address Joe Biden’s punchline-friendly criticism of McCarthy’s debt ceiling posturing, which went something like this: I can’t consider your demands until you make some.

McCarthy’s speakership is tenuous, to put it politely. You could pretty easily argue the gavel belongs not to McCarthy, but to the House GOP’s recalcitrant far-right flank, which put him through a historically humiliating 15 votes in January before finally allowing him to accede the third-highest position in the US government.

McCarthy pitched the bill as win of sorts. “We have done our job,” he declared, suggesting Biden has no choice but to negotiate. That’s not necessarily true, though. Biden can’t be removed from office, or at least not over this. We saw how difficult it is to get rid of a sitting president by procedural means in 2019, and then again in January of 2021. Biden could, theoretically, stick to his hardline position, which he reiterated this week. “I’m happy to meet with McCarthy, but not on whether or not the debt limit gets extended,” he said. “That’s not negotiable.”

McCarthy, by contrast, can be removed as House Speaker by his own party at the drop of a dime. Thanks to concessions he made in January, that process is now pretty expeditious. Biden can force him to put a “clean” debt ceiling bill up for a vote, putting the House’s hard right contingent in the very awkward position of either passing it, or allowing the US to technically default and hoping voter blame lands mostly on the White House lawn. If they’re unwilling to do that (so, if they’re forced to pass a clean increase), they could take it out on McCarthy.

Meanwhile, the x-date is no longer at risk of falling in June, according to Goldman’s Alec Phillips. “Tax receipts usually surge on the Tuesday in the week following Tax Day (April 18 this year), as the paper checks accompanying tax returns clear the banking system and enter the Treasury General Account at the Fed,” he wrote. “This year’s Tuesday haul was larger than expected, exceeding the comparable day last year by 14%.”

Month-to-date, tax receipts were down as much as 37% versus last year. Now, that figure is just 29%. “If the remaining receipts stay on this trend, we expect the Treasury to come within $50-60 billion of exhausting its resources in the second week of June, but to be able to continue to make all scheduled payments until the end of July without an increase in the debt limit,” Phillips went on.

So, negotiations (to the extent there are any) likely have more runway now. If you ask Goldman, the final result will probably be a cap on discretionary spending that falls well short of what the current House bill imagines.

As a quick reminder, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell won’t let the US “default.” Rather, Treasury would have to suspend other government outlays so it could keep making interest payments. In other words: Your elected representatives may force the government to default to you, the taxpayer, but bondholders will probably be fine. Here’s hoping you hedged any government financial assistance to which you’re entitled with Treasurys.