Isn’t. At least, it shouldn’t be. Provided he can find his spine and a pair of (hopefully not orange) balls.

[…] pressure is on the GOP to get stronger cuts in exchange for increasing the $14.294 trillion national debt ceiling. The debt limit applies to so-called “debt subject to limit”, which as of April 20 stood at $14.262 trillion, just $32 billion shy of the ceiling. An alarmist White House has warned that the nation will default if the ceiling is reached.

But as noted by Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson, that’s not entirely true. “The existing debt could still be refinanced, but interest owed on the debt would have to be paid out of revenue and the budget would also have to be balanced immediately. That is not a default,” he said.

Instead, it would all depend on the choices that the Treasury makes about whether or not to pay the nation’s creditors out of existing revenue. If we default, it will be because the Treasury made a conscious decision not to pay those creditors.

The Administration’s scare tactics apparently are not having much of an effect on the public. A recent survey by Pulse Opinion Research conducted for The Hill found that 62 percent of likely voters oppose raising the debt ceiling under any circumstances. Significantly for Mr. Boehner, 77 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of independents opposed increasing the debt limit. Even 46 percent of Democrats oppose raising it.

That means if House Republicans acquiesce to a so-called “clean” vote on the debt ceiling, as the White House is demanding, they will likely lose more support amongst Americans who just got done sending them back into the majority in 2010. So, they need something in return for the vote — something big.

There have been several suggestions as to what Republicans ought to demand in return for increasing the debt ceiling. For example, Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio has recently written that “I will vote to defeat an increase in the debt limit unless it is the last one we ever authorize and is accompanied by a plan for fundamental tax reform, an overhaul of our regulatory structure, a cut to discretionary spending, a balanced-budget amendment, and reforms to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

In these pages, Americans for Limited Government has written that at a minimum, any increase in the ceiling should include the Balanced Budget Amendment proposed by Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch.

Still others have proposed tying the House-passed 2012 budget authored by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan to an agreement to raise the ceiling. That proposal will reduce outlays by about $110 billion for 2012 and implement spending caps going forward, resulting in about $5.8 trillion in deficit-reduction over ten years.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has indicated Republicans will fight for something, saying, “if the President and our Democratic colleagues refuse to accept serious reforms that immediately reduce federal spending and end the culture of debt in Washington, we will not grant their request for a debt limit increase.” Yet, no specifics were offered — yet.

[…]

Even the Washington Post editorial board, alarmed by S&P’s recent downgrade of the outlook on U.S. debt from “stable” to “negative” declares that “the looming debt limit vote offers an opportunity to accomplish some real deficit reduction.”

With such widespread agreement on the need to couple the debt ceiling vote with real spending cuts, now Speaker Boehner and Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell need to deliver. Whether a Balanced Budget Amendment, which would rein in spending for all time, or a deal on the 2012 budget, the American people are watching — and they are expecting big cuts.

A BBA tied to a fixed 18% on spending and supermajority requirements for tax increases and future debt ceiling raises is a good start, but as many commenters here have noted, it isn’t at all sufficient: the process is unwieldy and lengthy (as it should be), which is why it needs to be coupled to more immediate demonstrations of fiscal good faith, such as major tax reform and a reform of the regulatory agencies, who have taken on a role that is anathema to the intended functioning of the federal government.

We are living in what Mark Levin has taken to calling a “post-Constitutional” state. As Dr. Walter E. Williams notes, the government structure as designed has been completely inverted — or, as I’ll put it, ironized — with the states given very limited (if any) administrative power, and the federal government, which was designed to to remain largely innocuous and unobtrusive (save for issues of defense and foreign affairs), is now swallowing up the civil society, reinforcing its centralized power through vast regulatory reach in complete contradiction to the intentions of the founders and framers.

Noting this — in yet another instance of the ironization of American society — now marks one as “extreme.” A desire to rein in this unconstitutional overreach and return the country to the governing principles and the structures laid out in the founding documents that assure such, is now “radical.”

The time to take the stand is here and now. Empty rhetoric — no matter how tough-sounding — can no longer be tolerated. Unfortunately, the GOP is being headed up by a weak leadership, one so terrified of negative press coverage and one so enmeshed in the big spending, horse-trading culture of inside the beltway politics, that it has been providing private assurances to the White House that it will push for “clean legislation” that will give government the permission to go on overspending, even as the same leadership simultaneously assures us it it will do the will of the voters.

Business as usual must be met with outrage and a refusal to accept any deals — and there should be dire consequences for those establishment GOP crybabies who fail to plant their flag on this particular battlefield.

They’ve already surrendered their leverage once out of fear and doubt. It can’t happen again.

****
update: Andrew McCarthy (via bh):

The people running this government are never going to deal with this untenable situation unless and until it becomes untenable for them. The only way that will happen is if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling and forces the administration to prioritize payment of those obligations that must be paid to maintain our full faith and credit — for as Kevin and Veronique point out, this already perilous situation could be blown sky high if the interest rate we must pay to borrow spikes. Only when there is no way around it will we get serious consideration of what government should and should not do, and what kind of welfare state the public is willing to pay for.

If we put it off, if we expand the credit card of a bankrupt Washington whose credit card needs to be cut to pieces right now, not only will our dire straits get worse. We won’t get to deal with them — we will be at the mercy of how they deal with us when the music finally stops.

Hey! Looks like we uncovered a few principled conservatives over there at NRO, after all!

Sweet!