Harry Reid seems to think that the debt limit fight is a fight worth having.

It’s that they simply don’t want to. “Let the Republicans have some buy-in on the debt. They’re going to have a majority in the House,” said Harry Reid. “I don’t think it should be when we have a heavily Democratic Senate, heavily Democratic House and a Democratic president.”

The theory goes something like this: Republicans will demand sharp spending cuts in return for lifting the debt ceiling. Let them. “Boehner et al have had the luxury of proposing all sorts of ideas that bear no relation to reality,” says Jim Manley, Reid’s spokesman. “Next year, they’ll have to lay it all out. No more magic asterisks, no more ‘we’ll get back to you.’”

In this telling, the debt ceiling vote represents a trap for Republicans more than an opportunity for Democrats. If Republicans want to cut spending, now’s their chance. But that means passing a package of spending cuts, which they may find less enjoyable than simply saying that Democrats should stop spending so much.

This would maybe be true if Gerald Ford were still running things in the House, but this group pretty much wants to slash spending. Especially when they have a giant talking point in the form of an $857 billion dollar tax cut package that blows up the deficit again. I understand the point that Republicans don’t actually care about the deficit, and they don’t, but they can use the rhetorical space around the deficit to get what they really want, which is the shrinking of government and social programs.

Even if they wanted to play around the margins, and cut just enough to please their base, it would amount to $50-$100 billion in spending, by Kevin Drum’s calculation. My calculation is that the only extensions above current law in this “stimulus,” with the possibility of actually being stimulative in 2011, is about $116 billion dollars. So this “around the edges” reduction would equal THE ENTIRE STIMULUS above current law expected from this bill. Why you would risk that to pick a fight is insane.

Now I should add that not only Harry Reid believes this. I talked with Michael Linden of the Center for American Progress yesterday, and he agreed that conservatives in Congress will have to raise the debt ceiling at the end of the day. “Speaker Boehner doesn’t want to be remembered for letting the country default and digging the economy into a huge hole.” His feeling is that nobody has a credible threat here, neither Democrats or Republicans. Whether Republicans will get in trouble with their tea party base over it is their problem and a trap that Reid and other Democrats appear to be happy to set. Linden even thinks that Republicans will have to appeal to Democrats to pass their debt limit in the House, and that would reduce the possibility of spending cuts in the process (I just don’t buy this – there are still plenty of Blue Dog Democrats in the House eager to cut spending).

I just think that extends a lot of faith to Democrats and the President to get things right. The conventional wisdom, that this tax bill means that “serious deficit reduction” must come immediately to counter-balance it, has already taken hold in the establishment. Here’s one deficit troll from today. The argument that Republicans will make in public – regardless of their implicit knowledge that they’ll eventually raise the debt limit – will have a receptive audience. Democrats are petrified of letting taxes go up a bit right now, in what scenario will they not be terrified of letting the country default?

And, as Mike Konczal says, there is absolutely no upside to extending this fight. It’s not like Democrats will get something they want out of the debt limit deal, other than raising the debt limit.

I think it is very likely that Boehner keeps the group together to get a strong piece of flesh out of Obama and win the media narrative too. Maybe the remaining Democrats will be stronger and more cohesive next year, and can take on this challenge. Though it seems like a lot of downside for only limited upside.

Maybe it’s about setting a trap for Republicans, and maybe that works, but I don’t see why we should expect the President to be a better negotiator on the debt limit than he was on the tax cuts. Not to mention, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that spending cuts are pretty much where he wants to go, too. More on that in a bit.