I know that a lot of people are getting nervous about the potential problems that may come from a government shutdown on August 2, 2011. However, I really am not worried and I think things will turn out fine if the Republicans do not blink. Nevertheless, Brummett is right when he says it appears that they are blinking.

John Brummett in his article, “Your hero is the one blinking,” Arkansas News Bureau, July 14, 2011 observed:

So it happened on Tuesday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, bless him, blinked.

He’d already blinked a little, declining to filibuster a debt ceiling solution by which Republicans could kill any deal by invoking 60 votes. But this time he told a news conference that, while it was all Obama’s fault, the nation needed an escape hatch, a parachute, so that America would meets its debt obligations in the likely event a spending-cut compromise couldn’t be reached by Aug. 2.

So he proposed that, for a last gasp, Republicans would reject any real debt ceiling resolution and merely vote to give Obama periodic authority to make unilateral and short-term adjustments in the debt ceiling.

That would permit America to make its debt payments on time while permitting Republicans to run against Obama as the wild socialist spender who keeps personally piling up our innocent grandchildren’s unsustainable debt.

Remember that McConnell is on record saying the sole purpose of his Senate service is to get Obama beat.

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I had been hopeful that the Republicans would stay the course. Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute expresses my views below on this debate.

McConnell’s Cave-In and Boehner’s Opportunity

Posted by Chris Edwards

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has offered the president a way to raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion without having to cut spending. The WaPo reports that “McConnell’s strategy makes no provision for spending cuts to be enacted.”

This appears to be an epic cave-in and completely at odds with McConnell’s own pronouncements in recent months that major budget reforms must be tied to any debt-limit increase.

House Republicans should obviously reject McConnell’s surrender, and they should do what they should have done months ago. They should put together a package of $2 trillion in real spending cuts taken straight from the Obama fiscal commission report and pass it through the House tied to a debt-limit increase of $2 trillion. Then they shouldn’t budge unless the White House and/or the Senate produce their own $2 trillion packages of real spending cuts, which could be the basis of negotiating a final spending-cut deal.

For those who say that House tea party members won’t vote for a debt increase, I’d say that $2 trillion in spending cuts looks a lot better than the alternative of having Democrats and liberal Republicans doing an end-run around them with McConnell’s no-cut plan.

For those who say that House members are scared of voting for specific spending cuts, I’d say that they’ve already done it by passing the Paul Ryan budget plan. I’d also say that you can’t claim to be the party of spending cuts without voting for spending cuts.

Obama’s Fiscal Commission handed Republicans ready-made spending cuts on a silver platter—Republicans will never get better political cover for insisting on spending cuts than now.