Give a break to Boehner

As frosty as the rhetoric will get in this last week leading up to a deadline for default, the ice is actually melting. Tuesday’s press conferences from a combative President Obama and an exhausted Speaker John Boehner provided properly timed hints that each side is preparing for the eleventh hour. It will take another chaotic, damaging week, but it’s clear an endgame is now in sight.

Obama offered Republicans the chance to punt, with a temporary debt-ceiling increase. Boehner attached no strings to a potential deal, just that there be one for raising the debt ceiling — something Obama has known all along must happen. ObamaCare, the very reason the GOP dug this political hole of a shutdown and now a dance with default, is now officially off the table.

{mosads}The heretofore silent Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a Boehner loyalist, charged into the spotlight of the toxic fight Wednesday with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, putting to rest any notion that a delay of ObamaCare is the GOP price for raising the debt ceiling — he simply never mentioned it. Boehner promptly tweeted Ryan’s piece. Conservatives hated it but leadership has obviously moved on, and is now fighting on solid ground over curbs to Medicare and Social Security and an overhaul of the tax code, both of which would attack our deficits and debt. 

Ryan made explicitly clear that Republicans could trade new cuts for the replacement of parts of sequestration. “For example, most of us agree that gradual, structural reforms are better than sudden, arbitrary cuts. … We could provide relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs,” he wrote. Ryan then went on to list several reforms Obama has agreed to in past budget negotiations. It isn’t exactly common ground, or fertile ground, but it isn’t frozen either.

Obama can keep telling the public he won’t talk, but he will. He insisted Tuesday he is happy to talk, just not under the threat of defaulting on our debt. Republicans can take that as a sign that a temporary debt-increase deal could lead to many long talks about what to do next. And a temporary bill is no surrender.

It was clear that even though the president had already called Boehner on Tuesday morning to tell him again that he won’t negotiate, he felt compelled to spend more than an hour on camera saying it for one reason: the GOP narrative that the president of the United States won’t talk about how to avoid default harms him. While the shutdown will be blamed solely on the Republicans in Congress, Obama and his team are painfully aware that the closer we get to actually breaching the debt ceiling, the more the president will share the blame with the “hostage takers,” as he calls them.

So Obama will retreat, and he will talk, and he will take the victory he has won: no changes to ObamaCare. Meanwhile, he must allow Boehner something to walk away with. The man is begging, even calling for an new and improved supercommittee, which pretty much says it all. He has amazed critics and doubters with his ability to unite his conference through this battle, but it won’t be long lived. Ultimately, the conservatives he has made so happy these last weeks by embracing their defund — no, delay — no, shutdown — strategy will revolt in disgust when the debt ceiling is reached and the government reopened. Boehner knows just how ugly it will be, but governing shall resume.

Mr. President, it’s time to end this all. Throw Boehner a bone.

Stoddard is an associate editor of The Hill.