If we are going to have a stupid fight in the House over the debt limit, it might help the negotiations to have an equally stupid counter-measure to address a failure to raise the debt limit in a way that would be particularly painful to Republicans and to Republican mythology.
And then I was reading from an LA Times article
To an unprecedented degree, today's Republican majority in the House is centered in the states of the old Confederacy. The GOP enjoys a 57-seat advantage across the 11-state region that stretches from Texas to Virginia.
What if the threatened Democratic response to a threatened Republican shut-down was based on criteria that hurt Republican Congressional districts the most?
You could take an updated version of this chart reported in The Washington Post in 2010 that shows that "Red" states typically receive more than a dollar of spending for every dollar of taxes that they pay. Develop a contingency plan for the massive cuts required by a failure to raise the debt limit that starts first with cutting back spending in states that currently receive more in federal spending than they pay in taxes.
Or what if the cuts are proportioned by state based on the percentage of the population that pays federal taxes? As this map published in The American Conservative shows, the burden would be biggest on the solid Republican South. So proportion the cuts based on the percentage of taxpayers who pay taxes in the states.
These are examples of a whole family of stupid policies that would be stupid to implement (and administrative nightmares), but might be useful to develop for the stupid saber-rattling phase of negotiations.