Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a senior editor at National Review, and a leading conservative pundit. The views expressed here are his own.

We are nearing the limit of the borrowing authority that Congress has given the federal government.

Almost everyone agrees that the debt ceiling needs to be raised. Not even the flintiest conservative has advanced a plan for bringing the U.S. budget deficit to zero in the next few weeks. And the consequences of hitting the debt limit seem highly likely to be disastrous — even coming near it in 2011 seems to have hurt the economy.

Ideally, Republicans and Democrats would agree to couple the increase in the debt ceiling with measures to address the underlying problem that keeps leading to increases: the mismatch between our spending commitments and revenue. The debt limit provides the only occasion on which Congress and the president have to take responsibility for the amount of debt their fiscal policies generate.

This spring, I outlined some ideas for reducing the dangers of hitting the debt ceiling, and some ideas for reducing long- term debt that might generate bipartisan consensus. Watch the news for a few minutes, and you can see that no such consensus has gelled. No serious attempt has even been made to create one.

Republicans, meanwhile, have adopted an unrealistic sense of how much of their policy agenda they can achieve by tying it to the debt limit. (An unrealistic sense of leverage seems to be a pattern with them this year.) Many of them want to force President Barack Obama to make major changes to his health care law, and in return give him nothing but the debt-limit increase.

There is no precedent for the satisfaction of such demands. Look back at every previous piece of legislation that raised the debt limit while also making changes to other government policies, and almost always the debt limit was the occasion for a bipartisan deal rather than the achievement of only one party’s goals.

The one partial exception came in 2011, when Obama agreed to spending cuts without getting any tax increases. But even that deal illustrates the constraints of the debt limit as a tool for advancing one party’s agenda. Republicans had to accept that half the spending cuts would come from defense, which Democrats liked more than they did. And for all the wailing that sequestration has produced, it was more modest than what conservatives are asking for this year. It was not a structural change to the welfare state or a reduction in its scope.

So the question now is — or should be — whether any genuinely bipartisan deal could be coupled with an increase in the debt ceiling. Reaching a deal would require what all voluntary exchanges do: a symmetric inequality of value. Republicans would give ground on policy A to gain it on policy B. A deal would be possible because Republicans valued B more than A, and Democrats valued A more than B.

So, for example, Republicans might offer a temporary increase in spending from the levels of sequestration in order to delay the time when the Internal Revenue Service starts fining people for not buying insurance (which is scheduled for the spring of 2015). Republicans might do this because they think that delaying the mandate will make it easier for them eventually to get rid of the health-care law, and Democrats might do it because they think their law will grow more popular with time. In that case, they couldn’t both be right, but they could both be happy about the deal at the time they made it.

At the same time, a deal should include policies that minimize the potential damage of a future debt-limit standoff. The most important one would be a law stipulating that even if the debt limit is breached in the future, the government will still be authorized to make debt-service payments in full, taking a default off the table. Republicans in the House have already passed a bill that would come close to doing this. Once this change is enacted, hitting the debt limit would mean having a partial government shutdown — which isn’t great, but not the disaster a default would be.

Could any of this happen? Well, most Republicans have already backed off the demands that their maximalists have been making: A majority of the House has already voted to keep the government funded without defunding Obamacare (but making changes to it). House Speaker John Boehner has said that he would rely on Democratic votes if necessary to prevent a default. And he has also, at least through leaks, put relief from sequestration the table.

When the House Republicans passed their bill to reduce the risks of a default, they implicitly acknowledged that the threat of default doesn’t actually provide the leverage to get anything constructive done, or at least anything worth the potential costs. They should follow that logic to its conclusion. Republicans can end the government shutdown, avoid a default and get a policy victory — but only if Democrats get one, too.

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a senior editor at National Review, and a leading conservative pundit. The views expressed here are his own.

August 11 (Bloomberg) — Newt Gingrich is telling Republicans not to fear a government shutdown because the last one went so well for them. This is pure revisionist history, and they would be fools to believe him.

Some Republicans are urging the party to refuse to back any legislation to keep the government operating unless funding for President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul is stopped. Other Republicans say this tactic will fail, citing the conventional wisdom that the government shutdowns of 1995-96 helped President Bill Clinton and hurt congressional Republicans.

Gingrich is trying to buck up the Republicans who favor this tactic, while reinterpreting an important episode in his career that has usually been taken to be a big mistake. He says the shutdown advanced Republican aims, making it possible to restrain spending and balance the budget.

The former Speaker of the House is off message, or rather is revealing a contradiction in the political strategy of his current allies. Their public line is that any shutdown would be the unfortunate product of Democrats’ obstinate refusal to give in to the Republican demand to defund Obamacare. But it’s not easy to convey that message when prominent Republicans are saying that shutdowns are good for their party.

More important, Gingrich’s current spin on the events of 1995-96 is just wrong. The election of a Republican Congress in 1994 put government spending on a lower trajectory, as the election of a Republican House did again in 2010. Whether the shutdowns contributed to that result is a different matter.

A Surrender

Almost nobody back then believed it. Democrats thought that they had won the battle over the shutdowns, and that the agreement to end them was a Republican surrender. Clinton made a point, in his next State of the Union address, to criticize Republicans for their strategy. It was an applause line. Clinton’s job-approval numbers started to rise as soon as the shutdown fight was over, and they never really sank again.

Republicans thought they had lost, too. A minority of them thought that they should have kept the government shuttered longer, and that Gingrich and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole had caved. (Gingrich was widely reported at the time to have told unhappy colleagues, “I melt when I’m around him,” referring to Clinton.) Most of them decided that bringing on a shutdown at all was a mistake.

It’s true, as Gingrich now says, that Republicans lost only a few House seats in the next election. But it’s also true that the shutdowns ended what had been called the “Republican revolution” of the mid-1990s. Before the shutdowns, the Republicans had talked about eliminating four cabinet departments. Afterward, they quit.

The view that Republicans had been routed was so widely accepted that some of them proposed legislation to prevent a shutdown from ever taking place again. The idea was that if no budget were enacted, the government would just keep going on the previous year’s funding levels. The legislation never went anywhere because Democrats thought the possibility of a repeat performance of the 1995-96 shutdowns gave them leverage.

Gingrich himself accepted the conventional wisdom that his party had lost. That’s what associates of his told me (among others) at the time, and that’s how they recollect it now. The “balanced budget deal” of 1997 included the creation of a new health care entitlement for children, something the Republicans of 1995 would never have accepted but the post-shutdown Republicans were too beat down to resist. The conservative end of the party hated the deal.

The Consequences

And that deal wasn’t the only leftward move the party made in response to Clinton’s victory in the shutdown battle. The rise of the big-government-friendly politics of George W. Bush was another, more consequential one. Gingrich is hoping that today’s partisans of smaller government have forgotten this history, or are too young to have experienced it.

While Clinton’s poll numbers improved after the shutdowns, Gingrich’s declined. After he lost his job as speaker, the Gallup Organization reviewed his generally low ratings in office and concluded, “The public appeared to turn particularly strongly against the Speaker after his budget confrontation with Bill Clinton and the resulting U.S. Government shutdown in late 1995.” Through most of the next two years, it noted, people who viewed Gingrich unfavorably outnumbered those who viewed him favorably by almost 2-to-1. That unpopularity, of course, contributed mightily to his losing the job at the hands of his Republican colleagues.

His successors should take note before they heed his advice.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.com

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a senior editor at National Review, and a leading conservative pundit. The views expressed here are his own.

July 26 (Bloomberg) — Conservatives on Capitol Hill think they have a chance to strike a mortal blow against President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul this fall. If their plan goes forward, however, it will backfire.

The plan is to oppose any bill to fund the government or increase the debt limit that also provides money for putting the health care law in place. Because Republicans control the House, Democrats can’t continue borrowing or paying for government operations without Republican support. So, conservatives say, Republicans should insist on defunding Obamacare as the price of that support.

The chance that Democrats would go along — would give up on their signature legislative initiative of the last decade soon after having won the presidential election and gained Senate and House seats — approaches zero percent. So if Republicans stay firm in this demand, the result will be either a government shutdown or a partial shutdown combined with a debt default.

Either would be highly unpopular, and each party would blame the other. The public, however, would almost certainly blame Republicans, for five reasons.

First, Republicans are less popular than the Democrats and thus all else equal will lose partisan finger-pointing contests. Second, the executive has natural advantages over a group of legislators in a crisis atmosphere. Third, people will be naturally inclined to assume that the more anti-government party must be responsible. Fourth, some Republicans will say that government shutdowns or defaults are just what the country needs, and those quotes will affect the image of all Republicans. And fifth, the news media will surely side with the Democrats.

This is true even though Obamacare is unpopular. Conservatives and moderate Democrats have grown more skeptical of it over time, and 22 House Democrats voted with the Republicans to delay its individual mandate. But none of those Democratic representatives would have a hard time standing against Republicans if they try this maneuver. They’ll just say they oppose a shutdown or a default. Democratic voters who harbor doubts about the health law will take the same view.

Bringing the federal government to a standstill would confirm the Democrats’ caricatures that conservatives are reflexively hostile to all government. And Republicans would be doing it without proposing a plausible replacement for Obamacare. So Democrats would be able to say that Republicans were crippling the government and credit markets in order to take health insurance away from 30 million people.

While Democrats would stay unified, Republicans would fracture as their standing in the polls dropped and negative news coverage continued. When they inevitably lost the fight, they would be more divided, unpopular and demoralized than before, and the cause of repealing Obamacare would look more like the hobbyhorse of incompetent fanatics.

Republicans are right that Obamacare is a very bad law. They urgently need a strategy for scrapping it — and any workable strategy has to include a conservative alternative, something few Republicans have shown much interest in proposing. Trying to defund Obamacare through a budget showdown isn’t so much a strategy as a flight from the responsibility of creating a realistic one.

Republican leaders in Congress, especially Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are resisting the defunding gambit because they strongly suspect it won’t work. Its advocates say anyone who rejects this tactic doesn’t really oppose Obamacare. That’s an absurd charge. But Republican leaders would be better able to dismiss it if they had their own strategy for replacing the law.

One possible outcome of this debate is that the Republican House passes a government-funding bill that doesn’t include money for Obamacare, but then gives in to the Democratic Senate on the issue. At that point the conservative groups that are pushing for defunding will say Republican leaders have again betrayed them, and get back to the vital work of raising donations off that idea.

That won’t be the happiest of endgames for Republicans, but it would still be better than a shutdown or default that failed to achieve their goals while inflicting political damage on themselves — and, in the case of default, substantial economic damage on everyone else.

The repeal of Obamacare is a worthy and potentially popular cause, but it won’t be accomplished through sheer willpower.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.com