This week, the federal government will once again reach the debt limit, or the amount of money it can legally borrow to pay its employees, contractors, and bills. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said that she can keep the government running through June with “extraordinary measures,” but after that, Congress will need to vote to legally raise the debt limit in order to keep virtually all parts of the government running.

By any rational measure, this shouldn’t be a big deal. There’s little technical reason for the debt ceiling to exist at all — a view shared, among others, by Yellen herself. Despite support from even moderate figures like Yellen, Democrats refused to eliminate the debt ceiling when they controlled both houses of Congress. Instead, they handed Republicans a loaded gun.

With the debt ceiling, as with counting votes or certifying an election, the Right hopes to seize on this otherwise drab government function as a point of leverage to thrust unpopular ideas onto the country. A faction of the incoming House Republican majority all but forced Kevin McCarthy to commit to shutting down the government before they would support his run for Speaker of the House. To be fair, McCarthy hardly needed to be strong-armed: he already said last fall that he planned to play chicken with Democrats over a government shut down in order to force cuts to Social Security and other government programs.