My Kevin’s debt ceiling conundrum He really has no idea what he’s doing. He’s just vamping to get through the day. Eric Levitz at NY Magazine: Hostage taking is, traditionally, a means to an end. A criminal organization wants to earn fast cash, so it kidnaps the child of a business tycoon. Or a militant group wants some of its members released from prison, so it seizes a government building. Maybe some of the individuals involved are sadists or psychopaths who get a kick out of threatening people’s lives. But their ultimate aim isn’t to terrorize; the ransom is the point. House Republicans, however, appear to be nontraditional hostage takers. Instead of formulating demands and then contriving a hostage situation in order to get them met, Kevin McCarthy’s caucus has formulated a hostage situation and is now scrambling to come up with some demands. The party knows it wants to threaten to trigger a global financial crisis unless Joe Biden gives them something. But they don’t actually know what that thing is. In recent days, the White House has reiterated its unwillingness to negotiate over a debt-ceiling hike. Its reasoning is simple: Everyone involved recognizes that raising the debt ceiling merely authorizes the executive branch to honor spending commitments that Congress has already made, and that failing to do so would have disastrous consequences for the American people. So neither party should try to coerce the other into passing policies antithetical to its ideology by threatening to torpedo the full faith and credit of the United States. At the same time, the…