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Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast.

We are going to talk a fair amount today about the debt limit, the debt ceiling.

You know, this whole thing that we have seen on the horizon.

Well, I mean, you know, in some way, you see it on the horizon.

As soon as you know, there's going to be a Democratic president

and a Democratic president who doesn't completely control Congress.

But we've seen this on the horizon going back to last fall or late summer.

And if anything, we thought it would be much more on the horizon.

Because at that point, we thought it was likely that either the Republicans would control Congress entirely.

And even if they didn't, even if Republicans didn't win the Senate,

certainly they would have a healthy margin in the House of Representatives.

As we know, it didn't turn out that way.

They did get in the majority, but only barely.

And just because of the legislative physics of how this works,

the fact that it is a small, small, small margin, empowered the Freedom Caucus people.

And here we are.

And something has happened. I just was writing a post about this before we started recording.

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