I would look first at the mode in which authority is given, and the term for which it is given. Where authority is unrestricted and conferred for a long term, its results will be good or bad according as the men are good or bad to whom it is committed; and where consuls and tribunes are swept away, express powers are given to the new magistrates to make laws and do whatever else they think fit, with the entire authority of the whole people. Your debt ceiling is such an authority: a single vote, taken in the final weeks of a sitting Congress, before the new one is seated. I would not ask whether the men are good. I would ask what check remains.
I have observed that when one power grows, another must diminish; where the executive and the legislative are joined, or where a body may arrogate to itself what authority it pleases, it soon destroys all the other powers. To lift the borrowing limit before the incoming majority can sit is to remove from them, in advance, the moment at which they might have restrained the encroachments of the executive. The article says the aim is to strip the incoming majority of significant bargaining power. That is the mechanism, and it is the oldest one: whoever moves first, while the other is not yet assembled, decides the terms.
Yet I would also caution the other side. A power that is not limited by any tribunal is dangerous in the hands of whoever holds it, and the temptation to use it does not disappear when the men change. If you deny your rivals the occasion to check you, you teach them that the only remedy is to do the same when their turn comes. The threat to the markets is distant, you say; the threat to the institution is nearer.
