The GOP’s shutdown dare

House Republicans set the stage this week for another high-stakes confrontation with President Obama over government spending, demanding that food stamps and other social programs be cut to restore billions to the Pentagon budget. House Speaker John Boehner said that unless Democrats and the president agreed to deep spending cuts, his caucus would again refuse to vote to raise the debt ceiling when government borrowing next reaches it, early in 2013. Boehner welcomed another battle over the debt limit as an “action-forcing event.” Last year’s tense negotiations between Congress and Obama over the debt ceiling ended with $1.2 trillion in automatic “sequestration” spending cuts, set to begin in January. But House Republicans acted last week to shield the Pentagon, passing a bill that would replace $55 billion in defense cuts with reductions in spending on food stamps, Medicaid, and financial regulation.

What a week for Republican extremism, said The New York Times in an editorial. First, GOP legislators voted to cut food stamps for more than 2 million Americans to protect “bloated military spending and unjustifiably low taxes for the rich.” Then, having driven the government to the brink of default last year at the cost of its AAA credit rating, the GOP declared it wants to “do it all over again.”

And why shouldn’t they? said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. After all, it “worked out well” for them last time. The GOP won $900 billion in spending cuts, sank President Obama’s approval rating to below 40 percent, and—intentionally or not—“set back the recovery,” thus giving them a better chance of knocking Obama out of office. If this culture of brinkmanship is to end, “the debt ceiling needs to be taken off the table once and for all.” The only question is how.

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The coming election will be a good start, said Jonathan S. Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. We’re trapped in this cycle of showdowns because the two parties offer such starkly contrasting visions of government. Let Republicans stand by their principle of fiscal restraint, and let the Democrats preach the value of “taxing the rich.” Then “let voters decide.” Once they do in November, we’ll have a clearer sense of whether it’s “time to talk compromise again.”