A slew of Congressional Republicans — including Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and a handful of GOP representatives — have said that they will flat-out refuse to raise the debt ceiling when the country’s legal borrowing limit is reached in the next few months. Other Republicans, however, have decided that they’d rather hold the credit worthiness of the United States hostage to various demands.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for instance, said that “I will not vote for the debt ceiling increase until I see a plan in place that will deal with our long-term debt obligations starting with Social Security.” Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) said in a statement today that “the American people will not stand for such an increase unless it is accompanied by meaningful action by the President and Congress to cut spending and end the job-killing spending binge in Washington.”

During an event today at the National Press Club, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that failing to raise the debt ceiling is “unworkable.” “Obviously, you can’t default,” he said. However, he is still trying to hold the increase hostage to unspecified “fiscal controls” and spending cuts:

RYAN: Does it have to be raised? Yes, you can’t not raise the debt ceiling. Default is the unworkable solution, or the alternative, I guess I’d say — the unworkable alternative. But we do not want to just have some naked debt ceiling increase. We want to have real fiscal controls, real spending cuts, in order to do that.

Q: The former senator, you know, Phil Gramm, once told me that his political rule was never to take a political hostage you’re not prepared to shoot. And you have to pass a debt ceiling increase, so that’s a hostage you’re not prepared to shoot, ’cause you can’t. So how is that a winning strategy?

RYAN: There, there are, how long will we raise the debt ceiling?

Watch it:

Ryan’s meek threat to change the interval of how long he is willing to raise the debt ceiling shows that he hasn’t really thought this through at all. And with the credit worthiness of the U.S. on the line, as well as the prospect of a government shutdown, it’s easy to see why these threats don’t have much meat on them. Still, there are quite a few Republicans who seem intent on engaging in brinkmanship when it comes to this particular necessary task.

Campaigning before the recent midterm elections, House Republicans were adamant that, if given power, they would cut government spending. However, when pressed for specifics, many were unable to list even one single item they would cut from the budget. “The line-item will be across-the-board,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) embarrassingly responded when asked for specific cuts.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) was no stranger to the promise to cut government spending. In fact, he promised over and over for months to do everything he could to reduce the budget:

“We need to cut spending. That’s what the American people want. That’s what the economy needs.” [12/17/10]

“Let’s be clear, if we actually want to help our economy get back on track and to begin creating jobs, we need to end the job-killing spending binge. We need to cut spending significantly.” [12/17/10]

“Our new majority will prepare to do things differently, to take a new approach that hasn’t been tried in Washington before by either party. It starts with cutting spending instead of increasing it.” [11/3/10]

“We will not solve our fiscal challenges until we cut spending.” [8/25/10]

“If we want to solve the budget problem, we’ve got to have a healthy economy and we have to get our arms around the runaway spending that’s going on in Washington, D.C.” [8/9/10]

“And if in fact we’re elected to the majority you’re going to see us cut spending. You’re going to see us revive the economy and reform the way Congress does it job.” [10/5/10]

“If the lame-duck Congress is unwilling to cut spending and permanently stop all the tax hikes, the new House majority will act in January.” [12/1/10]

“Republicans have been consistently focused on offering better solutions to cut spending now.” [6/21/10]

“We will never get our economy out of the ditch until we cut spending and have real economic growth.” [8/30/10]

However, now that he holds the speaker’s gavel, it seems that Boehner is no better than his colleagues at actually identifying specifics in the budget that he would like to see eliminated. In an interview set to air tonight, NBC’s Brian Williams asked Boehner to name a specific item he’d cut, and Boehner couldn’t deliver:

WILLIAMS: Name a program right now that we could do without.

BOEHNER: I don’t think I have one off the top of my head.

Watch it:

During just their first couple of days in control of the House, Republicans have voided loads of promises when it comes to the budget, including halving their promised budget cuts for the current year (cuts which they now say were “hypothetical”) and exempting their first bill from their own budget rules.

ThinkProgress intern Paul Breer contributed research to this post.

As one of its first acts, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives decided to do away with the “pay-go” rule instituted by House Democrats, in favor of something called “cut-go.” Under pay-go, legislation that added to the deficit needed to be offset with either spending cuts or revenue increases elsewhere. Under cut-go, however, new spending can only be offset with spending cuts (which means that no new revenue is allowed, even from closing something like a corporate tax loophole), while new tax cuts are allowed to be deficit-financed.

Republicans have been very clear about how this works. In Congressional Quarterly today, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) tried to justify the change by saying, “I’ve never felt that letting people keep more of their own money should be in the same category as (government) spending more of their money.” But the distinction has evidently been lost on MSNBC, which today ran a segment on the new Congress with the chyron “GOP Requiring All Bills Be Paid For”:

“Just a quick note for the DC press corps,” Kevin Drum wrote yesterday. “Republicans don’t care about the deficit. They care about cutting taxes on the rich and shifting spending from the poor to more deserving corporate recipients.”

Not only did House Republicans craft their new rules to allow for unlimited deficit-financed tax cuts, they also immediately exempted their very first bill — repeal of the Affordable Care Act — from their cut-go rule, as such repeal would increase the deficit by $230 billion over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

House Republicans have made it abundantly clear with their initial actions that they have no intention of actually paying for any tax cuts they want to implement, no matter the effect on the deficit. Explaining something in a seven word chyron can be difficult, but this particular one was an outright falsehood.

House Republicans yesterday found themselves in a bit of trouble when they tried to explain that the $100 billion in spending cuts that they have been promising was only “hypothetical,” and they intend to actually cut about half of that from the budget. But for weeks, the GOP has been repeating over and over that it intended to lop $100 billion from the budget once it came into power, in line with the plan laid out in the much-hyped “Pledge to America.” Watch a compilation:

But last night, House Republicans made a concerted effort to move the goalposts. For instance, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said that “it’s a matter of looking at it in a calendar year,” while Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that everyone really should be looking at the cuts the GOP will make in 2012. “When the fiscal 2012 budget comes up, we’re going to be cutting,” Ryan asserted. Watch a compilation:

Republicans are arguing that since the continuing resolution passed by the House in December covers government spending until March, they only have half of the fiscal year to work with, thus they can only achieve half their promised savings. However, Republicans knew full-well that a continuing resolution was in place, but still consistently promised to cut $100 billion all the way into the new year. Cantor himself repeated the $100 billion number one day before Republicans were sworn in and adjusted their estimates.

Even the conservative Daily Caller noted the GOP’s budget flub, writing, “Republicans would have known this would happen way back in the fall when they first started using the $100 billion figure. That raises the question of why GOP communications shops did not start using a different figure weeks ago, at the very least, and explaining why it had changed. Instead, it popped up on the day that the national spotlight on them was brightest.”