Politicians just interrupted regularly scheduled programming to bring you a message they’ve been repeating ad nauseum for the last three weeks.

President Trump went first. Sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, he read a watered-down stump speech from a teleprompter. Illegal immigrants and a flood of drugs are streaming across the border, the president said in so many words. The shutdown is the fault of Democrats, he continued, and the solution is some variation of a wall.

Notably lacking? Fireworks.

Trump was presidential in that Trump was unusually low key. He didn’t declare a national emergency, a move which would have thrown Congress and the courts into an immediate crisis. He just repeated the boilerplate language from his campaign.

Democrats offered their rebuttal next, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., standing cadaver-like behind a shared podium. They may haunt the dreams of any child who was unlucky enough to be awake during prime time, but aside from that they didn’t accomplish anything new.

Pelosi said the president was holding the country hostage. Schumer followed up arguing that the president was appealing to fear, not facts, and that Democrats and Republicans agree border security is necessary. They just disagree, Schumer posited, on how to do it.

Pundits promised that this would be a clash of the political titans, a rough-and-tumble exchange of fire worthy of the last two years of hysteria. It was instead a 20-minute dud with all the drama of a “Friends” rerun.

And believe it or not, that is a good thing.

Nothing bad happened tonight, because nothing dramatic went down and nothing changed. Governing from crisis leads to unforeseen outcomes and extra-constitutional actions. Instead, both sides laid out their battle lines after kicking a little dust in prime time.

With a little more than a fortnight to go before the government shuts down once more in the absence of a budget deal, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has publicly touted bringing a debt ceiling deal into the mix of border security negotiations. This should really go without saying, but adding even more brinkmanship into Republicans’ common sense compromise is a terrible call.

For one thing, Democrats successfully called President Trump’s bluff in the shutdown. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., simply waited out the five-week political faux pas, banking on the fact that the public would blame Trump for making what essentially amounted to an eleventh hour demand. Although Trump’s actual demands were sensible enough, just one billion dollars more for border security than Democrats pushed for in the Gang of Eight bill in 2013, Pelosi successfully framed the narrative not as Democratic obstruction but Republicans holding the government hostage. And she won.

The debt ceiling issue will arise on its own in March, and Congress will have to vote on authorizing the government to borrow money and pay back its debts. Our skyrocketing national debt is a ticking time bomb of its own, one now much greater than our annual gross domestic product and reaching a proportion of our economy not seen in almost a century. Social security, which Trump has foolishly promised not to touch, will become insolvent in just 15 years, and Medicare is currently spending more than three times per capita of what its recipients paid into it.

But the solution to our egregious national debt is not to default on our loans, or even to threaten to.

Any further manipulation of the debt ceiling would backfire. Republicans want a physical barrier along the southern border as well as extra funding for courts and personnel, but they’ve made clear that they’re open to issuing major concessions to the Democrats to get it. And if you support both letting the people already here stay and preventing new illegal immigrants from coming in, Trump’s compromise makes sense. Granting a sizable DACA extension — a constitutional one this time — or amnesty cannot be done so long as the border remains so permeable without incentivizing further illegal immigration. And Democrats would be dumb to give Trump his key campaign promise without demanding a permanent and legal solution to the fates of DACA recipients and temporary protected status holders.

Trump’s problem right now is one of messaging. He’s logically correct in his compromise, or at least the direction that he’s going in. He’s no longer withholding pay from 800,000 federal workers. If Pelosi refused to name her price when Trump has made his inelasticity of demand so apparent, it means one of two things: She’s an actual open borders extremist who’s made a full 180 on the importance of sovereignty and law enforcement, or she cares about “Dreamers” so little that she’d rather blow a once-in-an-administration opportunity to secure their destinies forever.

This is the story Republicans need to be telling. But to add an issue as economically threatening and politically toxic as the debt ceiling into the mix would only complicate the story, not clarify it.

Democrats are rejecting a backup proposal to temporarily fund the government if a broader border security deal falls through.

A senior Democratic aide said Monday that Democrats will not agree to a yearlong spending bill to keep the Homeland Security Department funded because Democrats believe it would allocate too much money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and too much money for barriers along the southern border.

The opposition to such a plan might make it even more difficult for Congress to meet a Feb. 15 deadline to agree to some kind of spending deal that includes border security funding. Republicans are pushing for even more border security spending, including funds for a border wall, in the ongoing talks.

But with little progress in those talks and Democratic threats to spike the level-funding backup plan, the chances are rising again that a partial government shutdown will happen at the end of this week. With no deal by Friday, dozens of agencies and nine departments would partially shutter for the second time this year.

Democrats are saying specifically that they can’t agree to a continuing spending resolution unless it puts more limits on funding for ICE and a border barrier.

“A so-called ‘clean’ full-year CR for Homeland Security would allow the Trump administration to increase funding for both physical barriers and ICE detention beds,” the Democratic aide said.

Democrats want to limit ICE detentions to 16,500 between now and the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30. That’s now a major sticking point in the bipartisan talks among lawmakers seeking a border security funding deal.

Democrats want to cut the number of detention beds, which would prevent ICE from holding detainees.

“Under a full-year CR, the Trump administration would fund ICE adult detention beds at a level of 46,000 or even higher,” the aide said. “In contrast, in conference negotiations, Democrats and Republicans had narrowed down the potential funding level for ICE to a range that would require ICE to ramp down the number of detention beds to between 34,000 and 38,500 by the end of the year.”

The aide said the Trump administration also believes it would be able to use $2 billion in the CR for physical barriers along the U.S. Mexican border.

“An acceptable compromise will fund border security without being overly reliant on physical barriers, and will include curbs on the Trump administration’s cruel immigration policies,” the aide said.

On Monday afternoon, a group of bipartisan negotiators were huddled in the Capitol, attempting to revive talks that stalled after Democrats insisted on capping ICE detentions.