Rather than grasping for a dry, debt-ceiling increase or some fussy federal budget, how about a "sense of Congress" resolution that declares its signers as prototypical banana republicans; acknowledges they have swiftly degenerated into Buster Keaton chaos, with more zany hijinks to come; and merely authorizes the Treasury secretary to awake El Presidente each morning to inform him how much national lunch money he has for the day.
Welcome to your grandfather's grandson's Republican Party, a bifurcated collection of poltroonish managers and squalid misfits, whose upper-chamber minority leader suggests parliamentary magic tricks as a substitute for competent governance, and whose lower-chamber majority leader summarizes his party's anarchic nihilism by conceding, "Nothing can get through the House right now. Nothing."
One House member from Colorado declares that even $2.1 trillion in cuts "won’t do it for a lot of people," while another, "a veteran Florida Republican, said he couldn’t go home with $2.1 trillion in cuts." Yet another, from Texas, wouldn't you know it, courageously "implored his leadership to leave agricultural subsidies alone and cut food stamps," while the ineffably clueless Virginia Foxx, from the planet Cretin, "simply said the debt limit is Obama’s problem."
All of which leaves even Mitch McConnell's Nervous-Breakdown Compromise a trifle more than dubious, even as an eleventh-hour backstop. As the NY Times' bluntly assessed it:
McConnell’s plan would shift both substantive and political responsibility onto Mr. Obama, forcing him to take almost sole ownership of a debt-limit increase and any consequences from not doing more to address the budget deficit.
Meanwhile, Eric Cantor has let his truest, gangsterish colors fly by resorting to an infinitely seedy strain of blackmail: "We [the House and White House] both agree on entitlements. And in fact, we would both agree on what the president’s prescription for entitlement reform is, and we know what that is. So why don’t we do that?" (Hence the singular peril of an insincere negotiating position: the opposition will later swear you really meant it.)
Nevertheless the odds of a debt crisis appear substantially diminished. If nothing else, all this GOP panic reveals a modest recognition of a dire reality and who would be blamed for it. On the other hand, the odds of a dismantled GOP -- one in which a more moderate remnant survives, while a formal Tea Party is born -- appear greatly enlarged.