Can The Senate Save Us?

The Senate is attempting to pass a clean debt ceiling bill. Ezra hopes it will allow us to avoid default:

House Republicans don’t want to fold completely, of course. But it’s possible, given the beating they’re taking on the shutdown, that they won’t want to risk an actual default. One possible endgame with the debt ceiling, then, is that it gets lifted even as the shutdown continues, perhaps because Boehner and Ryan persuade House Republicans that the shutdown is their real leverage and a default is something Democrats want them to do because it will destroy the Republican Party for a generation. It’s possible to imagine the Senate’s debt-ceiling bill passing even as their reopen-the-government bill languishes.

Beutler adds:

House Republicans might be an ungovernable mess. But the people who control the floor understand the real dangers of breaching the debt limit. And Democrats don’t need more than 15 or 20 Republican votes to cut the right loose and increase the debt limit. As weak as John Boehner is, he’s not that weak. If we breach, it will be because he chose not to deliver them.