Hi, GabFest fans. Today's show is going to be posted a little later than usual. So to give you your morning political fix, here's an article from Slate called Dancing on the Sealing, how Republicans are framing the debate about the debt ceiling and Democrats are playing along. It's written by David Weigel.

Washington's latest guns-a-blazing battle is over whether Congress will raise the debt

limit.

Five months ago, there was no disagreement.

Congress would raise the debt ceiling.

The journey from there to here is a case study of how conservatives decide what

Washington debates, and maybe how Democrats have learned to play along.

In December, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. It would have been possible for them to raise the debt limit then,

months before the Treasury Department says the federal government will hit its $14.3 trillion debt limit.

The latest estimate is that the limit will be reached in May.

But Senate Majority Leader

Harry Reid took a pass on the vote. I want the Republicans to have some buy-in on the debt, he said.

They're going to have a majority in the House. I think they should have some kind of a buy-in on the

debt. Debt limit votes are, in political terms, somewhere between arsenic and strict nine.

Democrats raised the limit in December 2009 by razor-thin margins in the House and Senate,

and some of the people who'd voted to raise the limit lost their re-election bids.

And in December, only the most wild, untamed Republicans were saying they'd oppose a debt-sealing

increase. Republicans were saying on the record that they would bring a clean limit-raising bill to the

floor. This changed. Conservatives looked at the debt limit vote as one of three leverage

opportunities. Democrats call them hostage opportunities to force votes on the

cuts they want. The first opportunity was the continuing resolution for the current year's

spending, and GOP priorities like the defunding of the Affordable Care Act were left out of that.

...