The demand from House Republicans on Tuesday morning — there’s a new one every day — was recycled from the last fiscal crisis they created: a bipartisan “supercommittee” of 20 lawmakers to negotiate a way out of the two crises (the government shutdown and debt-ceiling deadline) the House has now merged together. It was a particularly cynical flourish, given the Republican sabotage of the last supercommittee, and Democrats were right to dismiss it.

As President Obama forcefully asserted at a news conference later in the day, there can be no negotiations until the government is open and until Republicans raise the debt ceiling and end the possibility of default. Negotiating under threat of economic calamity is untenable.

Once those threats are removed, however, there is plenty to discuss: how to replace the sequester cuts, which are already devastating domestic programs and are about to get much worse for defense spending; how to use fiscal policy to stimulate the creation of jobs and fix the nation’s infrastructure; how to repair a broken tax system, reduce long-term debt, and ensure that social welfare programs remain healthy.

These issues have been staring Congress in the face for years, and Republicans have run from them. They rejected Mr. Obama’s 2011 proposal for a grand bargain to reduce the deficit by cutting spending and raising tax revenues. Last year’s supercommittee briefly created the possibility that the two sides might agree on another debt-reduction package, but Republicans refused to even consider a deal that included higher revenues.