Will the government shutdown really defuse the debt standoff?

The federal government had barely started shutting down early Tuesday morning when Slate's Matthew Yglesias pointed out a potential upside of the House-led exercise in budgetary nihilism. Sure, "I'm a little frustrated that this is happening," he says, but "a shutdown is better than a stopgap solution since it gives us the best chance of avoiding a debt ceiling disaster."

This has become a prominent argument on the wonkier side of the political left, and even among some Republicans. Maybe it's just something they tell themselves so they can sleep at night, but it has a certain logic.

The idea is that a significant portion of the House GOP caucus is determined to have a standoff over ObamaCare, and a government shutdown is "a relatively safe space for the showdown," says The Washington Post's Ezra Klein. "It's visible and dramatic enough that the GOP will feel the public's ire," but low-stakes enough to not blow up the economy.

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"Better to shoot yourself in the foot than shoot yourself in the head" by defaulting on America's debt, Klein argues:

The Republican version of that argument, delivered by GOP lobbyist John Feehery, is a little gentler on the GOP. Demanding that Obama "repeal his signature legislative priority" or else is "a radical proposition," he says. But "maybe it's time to test that proposition, to lance the boil and to shut down the government for a while." He concludes:

The theory is that intransigent Tea Partiers will feel the heat if Republicans bear the brunt of the anger over the government shutdown — and so far, that seems plausible.

A new Quinnipiac poll is a disaster for the GOP: 72 percent of registered voters oppose shutting down the government over ObamaCare; 74 percent disapprove of how congressional Republicans are doing their job, versus a record-low 17 percent who approve; approval for ObamaCare is growing, albeit to a still net negative 45 percent approval, 47 percent disapproval; and Democrats have opened up a historically wide 9-point lead on the 2014 House generic ballot.

But Molly Ball at The Atlantic cautions against reading too much into these numbers. The idea that the minority of House Republicans intent on undermining ObamaCare will somehow blink in the face of bad poll numbers seems unlikely at best, she says. That theory didn't work when Obama was re-elected — if anything, Republicans "redoubled their efforts to thwart him" — because it fails to understand where the Tea Party faction is coming from, Ball argues:

So what if she's right and "sincere" Tea Partiers do push the U.S. towards busting through the debt ceiling?

If that's the case, University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner at Slate argues, Obama could just ignore Congress and raise the debt ceiling unilaterally:

Other legal scholars are not so convinced. The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart walks through both sides of the legal argument, quoting Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, who says such unilateral action by the president "is just a formula for lawlessness and chaos." So the constitutional grounds seem anything but clear cut.

This much is clear, however: This showdown could very quickly get very interesting, in a very uncomfortable way.