Presented by the American Petroleum Institute.

Hey there, Playbook listeners. It's Ragul Munovalin. Two big things we're watching on Tuesday, January 17th.

Indiana Republican Representative Jim Banks launched his bid to replace retiring GOP Senator Mike Braun today.

The former chair of the Republican Study Committee is widely seen as the favorite in the race,

which has already attracted interest from fellow Indiana representative, Victoria Sparks.

And Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress, the U.S. is said to reach its debt ceiling

on Thursday, and that extraordinary

measures would be taken to avoid default.

Absent congressional action, those measures would run out, she said, sometime not earlier

than June.

For more on that, here's Playbook editor Mike DeBonis and deputy editor, Zach Stanton.

Even though June is only a couple months down the road here, there is a real risk of this having long-term damage to the U.S. economy and potentially to U.S. bond ratings before June.

So we'll have to see how that plays out.

There's the economic impact, the economic toll, but there's also the whole political standoff here, which is something like, you know,

what you see in like Old Westerns, the so-called Mexican standoff situation, where a bunch of

people have guns pointed at one another, and it's really a test of who's going to blink first.

You have in the House, you have Kevin McCarthy saying that he's not going to budge,

that he doesn't really want to raise the debt ceiling.

You have potentially moderates in the House, moderate Republicans who might be willing in some cases to go

along with a reasonable debt-sailing increase that Democrats would agree to. You have the House Freedom

Caucus that is obviously not on board with raising the debt ceiling and would threaten the McCarthy

speakership if he were to allow such a thing to go on.

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