Can Republicans avoid blame for a government shutdown?

With a potential government shutdown looming at midnight on Monday, House Republicans remain opposed to passing a continuing resolution unless it in some way delays or chips away at the Affordable Care Act.

The Senate has flatly rejected the idea of approving anything but a clean budget bill, meaning that if Republicans refuse to give up their quixotic fight against ObamaCare, the government will close come Tuesday.

But Republicans have cast their efforts in the standoff as "compromises," and accused Democrats of being unwilling to bargain.

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"The House has twice now voted to keep the government open," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Sunday on Meet the Press. "If we have a shutdown, it will only be because when the Senate comes back, Harry Reid says, 'I refuse even to talk.'"

Yet as many have repeatedly pointed out, Republicans are the only ones asking for concessions here — and holding the economy as hostage.

Democrats are merely asking that the government continue to be funded at sequester levels — the reduced spending amounts both parties agreed to, and which were triggered when lawmakers couldn't find an alternate way to pare spending. Republicans are now making demands on top of those they already won, the difference being that the latest are designed to undercut ObamaCare.

Plus, the very idea of demanding concessions in exchange for not deliberately closing the government is a deeply unpopular argument. A CBS News/New York Times survey last week found that 80 percent of Americans said threatening a government shutdown was an unacceptable way to approach budget talks. And a CNN poll out Monday shows that 46 percent of Americans would blame congressional Republicans for a shutdown, while 36 percent would blame President Obama.

A shutdown is therefore "likely to be punishing for the GOP," says The New Republic's Noam Scheiber, who argues it could even be politically worse than the 1996 shutdown was for the party.

The GOP's high-stakes demands over ObamaCare, tacked to an unrelated spending bill, make it clear they will take the most blame, agrees the American Conservative's Daniel Larison. And, he argues, their willingness to let the government shut down only serves to reaffirm Americans' "nagging sense that they will wreck things again once they have control."

It doesn't help that voters have already made up their minds. After boisterous battles in 2011 and 2012 over government spending, Democrats swept last November's elections, winning the White House and picking up seats in both legislative chambers. As William Saletan at Slate puts it:

Even Karl Rove thinks Republicans are blowing it. "No sentient being," believes the defund strategy will work, he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. In pursuing it anyway, he warned, Republicans risk driving Independents to vote Democratic, thus hampering the party even more in future elections.