Republicans, led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, insist on government spending cuts as a condition of letting the US government borrow more money to pay its bills. Team McCarthy will probably get those spending cuts. In the end, however, Congress is likely to undo its own spending discipline, just as it has done before.

There’s a well-rehearsed playbook for the debt-ceiling theater Republicans and Democrats are forcing the nation to endure. Spoiler alert: It will end with a deal to cut federal spending that Republicans will declare heroic and Democrats will deride as unnecessary. In the future, however, Congress will renege on any spending cuts likely to be unpopular, underscoring just how absurd and pointless the whole debt-ceiling exercise has become.

The template for a solution to the debt-ceiling standoff in 2023 is the debt-ceiling deal of 2011. That has gotten a lot of attention lately as investors try to anticipate market dynamics as the “X Date,” on which the Treasury Dept. runs short of money, draws closer. In 2011, Congress didn’t finalize a deal until about three days before Treasury would have been forced to leave some bills unpaid. That was way too close for comfort.

The S&P 500 stock index (^GSPC) dropped nearly 7% during the two weeks leading up to the finalization of a deal on August 2, 2011. The deal produced no relief rally, with stocks sliding another 4.4% during the next three trading sessions. Then, on August 5, Standard & Poor’s cut the US credit rating by one notch, pushing stocks down another 6.7% in a single day. Stocks didn’t bottom until October, for a total peak-to-trough decline of 19.4% that year.

One reason the market didn’t celebrate the end of the debt-ceiling standoff in 2011 was the spending cuts contained in the Budget Control Act, the law Congress passed to allow more federal borrowing. The BCA included roughly $1 trillion in spending cuts during the next decade and it set up a “super-committee” of legislators charged with reducing future deficits by another $1.2 trillion. If the committee couldn’t come up with spending cuts Congress could pass, “sequestration" would happen, meaning automatic cuts in many government programs, including Medicare and national security funding. The automatic cuts would have been large enough to impact economic growth and hamstring sectors reliant on government spending, such as defense and health care.