Will Biden and McCarthy choose compromise or humiliation?

President Joe Biden will meet Tuesday with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to discuss the national debt ceiling, but their intensifying conflict is really two fights in one. Whether this standoff is easily resolved may depend on which battle they decide to focus on.

Democrats and Republicans disagree over the substance of fiscal policy, but they are also engaged in partisan politics. So they can choose to treat their dispute as an opportunity for substantive deal making — or use it to try to humiliate their political opponents.

Budget politics are always contentious because the two parties have sharply different visions of the government's proper responsibilities. But the yearly need to cut a bipartisan deal on tax and spending policy — even during periods of unified party government, appropriations legislation must attract enough support from the minority to overcome a Senate filibuster — has given congressional leaders and executive-branch officials ample experience in horse-trading, difference-splitting, and the artful crafting of legislative language that allows both sides to claim that they defended their values.

If the parties applied this approach to the current debate, they could conceivably reach an agreement that raised the debt ceiling until after the next election, alongside a set of spending cuts (perhaps exempting certain Democratic priorities) and reforms that eased the permitting process for energy projects. Alternatively, a short-term debt-ceiling extension could be paired with a smaller set of other changes, allowing a more permanent resolution to be rolled into the larger bipartisan appropriations negotiations scheduled for later this year.

Such a compromise would require Democrats to abandon their current insistence on a "clean" debt-ceiling increase, while Republicans would have to move away from the more extensive list of demands contained in the bill that narrowly passed the House last month. But it would resemble previous bipartisan budget agreements and assure both sides of avoiding the unpredictable political consequences of an unprecedented debt default.

Such a solution is far from assured. The House bill contained provisions that would repeal several of Biden's signature policy initiatives, including student-debt forgiveness and the tax subsidies for renewable energy production. Republicans' decision to include these items suggests that they want to force him to choose between preserving his substantive legacy and maintaining the stability of the U.S. economy.

Democratic leaders have been playing their own style of political hardball. Biden's initial position that he would not even entertain negotiations over the debt ceiling, for all its public justification as a principled rejection of Republican hostage-taking, was also intended to weaken the strategic leverage of McCarthy on the mistaken assumption that he would be unable to pass his own bill. Democrats hardly bother to contain their smirks over the ways that internal divisions cause difficulties for Republican leaders, and gleefully predict that a successful debt-limit extension without major concessions to conservatives would make McCarthy more vulnerable to being deposed as speaker by renegade members of his own party.

To be sure, the possibility of default merits the serious concern of the public. But too much attention could make this standoff harder to resolve. If strong partisan supporters become heavily invested in the battle, they will pressure leaders on both sides to reject compromise in favor of seeking victory in a crowd-pleasing game of chicken.

Biden and McCarthy are both essential participants in any potential legislative compromise, which will require the speaker to allow a floor vote in the House and the president to sign it into law. But both men also face especially strong incentives to be perceived as winning: Biden needs the enthusiastic support of the Democratic base as he gears up for reelection, and McCarthy cannot afford to lose the trust of the famously restless House Republican conference.

In Washington, progress often requires the threat of imminent crisis. Perhaps the Senate, with its tradition of fostering cooperation and greater insulation from the demands of partisan activists, will develop a workable resolution at the last minute. But it is by no means certain. In an age when many Americans take more satisfaction from the embarrassment of their political enemies than from the success of their allies, there will always be politicians who would rather risk national chaos than find a way to simply muddle through.