Late last week President Obama called Speaker Boehner to say that he wouldn’t negotiate on the debt limit.

This strikes me as an irrelevant threat. As best I can tell, no one was proposing such negotiations. Indeed after the tax increase fight last December, Speaker Boehner made a point that he would henceforth return to regular order rather than engage in ad hoc one-on-one negotiations with the President.

To increase the debt limit one needs the House and Senate to pass identical bills which raise (or suspend for a time) that limit, and then for the President to sign that bill, or at least not veto it. To pass identical bills it may be necessary for Speaker Boehner and Leader Reid to negotiate. But the President and his advisors don’t have to be part of that discussion. Speaker Boehner needs only the President’s reluctant after-the-fact acquiescence to a House-Senate agreement legislated without the President’s direct participation. To succeed Speaker Boehner does not need President Obama’s up-front and public approval.

Had the President wanted to make a threat that mattered, he would have told the Speaker “If you send me anything other than a clean debt limit bill, I’ll veto it.” That would have been a red line. He didn’t make such a threat, and that’s intentional. But the actual threat made by the President sounds tough to his allies without actually constraining his future options. The President won’t have to retreat (again) from a red line threat, because he hasn’t actually drawn a red line.

The legislative reality is that in the current House-Senate configuration, President Obama will never veto a debt limit bill.

He won’t have to. If there’s a provision that he hates enough that he would veto it if it were attached to a debt limit bill, he can simply threaten a veto, publicly and/or privately. He can tell Leader Reid, “Harry, don’t send me that bill or I’ll have to veto it.”  And, if the threat is unequivocal enough, Leader Reid will then ensure that a bill containing that provision does not pass the Senate.

Alternatively, the President can use his bully pulpit to urge his allies in Congress to block any bill that contains the offending provision. The bully pulpit and the hammer of a veto threat (rather than a veto) are sufficient tools for President Obama to prevent big policy changes that he detests being attached to a debt limit […]