“And then, when it is done, the Republicans make their greatest of all threats: to Renounce the National Debt!”
The GOP would never do it, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t become an issue. If those lending the money thought that renunciation was a threat, they would divest themselves in a New York minute.
Divest to who? Right now, both the Chinese and the Japanese are stuck with far more than a trillion dollars of US debt, and would like nothing better than to dump it. Except doing so would find few if any buyers, and crash the value of their paper assets.