politically dangerous conflicts that have caused americans and global, global markets to question whether or not america is serious about paying its bills. it s flirting with a self-inflicted crisis. and it really involves the government giving their treasury secretary and their president conflicting sets of instructions. in the past 50 years, congress has acted 78 times to raise the debt limit, 49 times under republican presidents, 29 times under democrats. let s bring in cnn political analyst and editor of axios. disaster averted temporarily, though. why can t we just get rid of this thing? you know, democrats for a second there looked close, christine. that whole debt ceiling filibuster conversation that