The word from the companies that evaluate sovereign debt is that the U.S. government has used up its last time-out on its massive indebtedness.

There will be no downgrades as a result of the supercommittee’s long-expected failure and likely none for the next year as a fickle American electorate decides whether it is going back into the arms of the Obama Democrats or will stay on the run with the GOP.

The message from Fitch Ratings on Monday: Have your election, make up your mind and then do something quick. This reinforces the fact that however the election goes – revenge of the left, affirmation of the right or some muddle – there will be very little time in which to make some dramatic moves to curb the exploding debt. Like maybe five weeks.

The 2012 election looks mostly to be about how America should deal with this debt.

The Fitch Ratings agency on Tuesday affirmed its AAA credit rating for the federal government, giving the U.S. a boost just two weeks after another ratings agency marked it down for the first time in history.

“The key pillars of U.S.’s exceptional creditworthiness remains intact,” the agency said, crediting the U.S. economy’s pre-eminence and the dollar’s role as the world’s chief reserve currency. The agency also said it gives the U.S. long-term outlook a “stable” rating.

And, wading into the ongoing battle on Capitol Hill, the agency threw its support behind “an appropriately formulated balanced-budget commitment that was explicitly recognized in the budget process” — which could give a boost to the kind of balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution that Republicans are pushing but that President Obama has said he opposes...