You've Got It Backwards, Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan (R-WI) is right about something. No, really! Well, he's kind of right about it. Let's say he's right about the magnitude, but wrong about the direction. Or something.

Here's what he's right about: the ongoing government shutdown should, in its resolution, be connected to the upcoming debt ceiling we-can't-cope-with-the-fact-that-we've-breached-this-months-ago problem. Here's what he's got backwards: he thinks the debt ceiling should resolve the shutdown. That is, his expectation is that the crisis of the shutdown all by itself won't be enough to force an agreement, and that a resolution will only come as part of the negotiations around the debt ceiling in a couple of weeks. Or, to put it another way, he as a leader of the Republican Party doesn't plan to stop being so insane about everything just because of a little ol' shutdown, and he plans on stringing things out long enough for the threat of an imminent debt ceiling calamity to make Obama back down. One manufactured crisis isn't getting it done, so he's gonna try for two of 'em piled on top of each other.

What should happen, of course, is that sometime in the next few days pressure from constituents should force Republicans to back down. Apparently there's polling showing a nine-point lead in the generic Congressional ballot for the Democrats; if that were to happen in November 2014, say hello (again) to Speaker Pelosi. And probably a ton of Democratic state legislatures who would hopefully mid-decade redistrict the shit out of things. Republicans, in other words, ought to start getting scared. And when they're sufficiently scared, Obama and the Democrats must say to them, we're not letting you out of this until you take the other ticking time bomb off the table. In other words, when they pass a continuing resolution to end the shutdown, it had bloody well better raise or eliminate or suspend the statutory debt limit. And no, that isn't unreasonable; if a "clean" CR passes, without dealing with the debt limit, then the whole shutdown won't have settled anything, and the whole "Republicans threaten to blow up the world in a revolutionary attempt to upend the entire constitutional order" thing will still be very much alive. And that's the problem, not the shutdown. I mean, it's a problem too. Tells you something about the times we live in that a government shutdown is not the problem right now. But it really isn't, and if it causes Republicans to get scared enough that they have to surrender, that surrender had better deal with the actual problem.

So yes, Paul Ryan, the debt limit and the shutdown should get resolved together. But that's not because the shutdown should keep going until it gets reinforcements from the debt ceiling crisis, forcing Obama to enact the Romney agenda once and for all. It's because once your side is forced to concede, and to put down the gun, it should have to hand over both of its guns, especially the bigger one. There's no point half-disarming a hostage taker.