William Galston: "On 17 October, the US government will run out of money"

I do not know how the current fiscal controversy will end. I do know how it will not end, however. President Obama will block all efforts to delay, defund, or deform his signature accomplishment: the Affordable Care Act, known to friend and foe alike as Obamacare. As long as Republicans continue to demand substantial changes in the law as the price for reopening the government and raising the debt ceiling, gridlock will reign.

There are indications that some rank-and-file Republicans are beginning to understand this. I suspect that their leaders have from the start but didn't dare say so.

That leaves a number of possibilities. One is that in the end, the Republicans will simply capitulate and agree to end this crisis without getting anything in return. Speaker of the House John Boehner reportedly told several worried Republican moderates that he will not permit the US to default on its debt. If he said that and meant it, then Obama need only stand firm. That seems to be what he is inclined to do anyway.

It's hard to believe, however, that the Republicans would readily accept the humiliation of coming away empty-handed. It's more likely that they will shift the fight from Obamacare to fiscal issues, where they enjoy more public support. The Democrats' position is that the government should be reopened and the debt ceiling raised before fiscal talks can begin. The Republicans say that they would lose all their leverage if they consented to such an arrangement. One can imagine a resolution that established a sequence: the government would be funded, the debt ceiling would be raised, and negotiations would begin – in that order.

There is support among a number of Democratic and Republican moderates for a minimal version of this strategy: a resolution funding the government at current levels would be enacted, linked to a repeal of the widely-disliked tax on medical devices (part of Obamacare). To placate the deficit hawks, other revenue sources would replace the $30bn the medical device tax would have raised over the next decade.

I have left the worst for last – the possibility that Congress and the president could reach 17 October – the date on which the government exhausts its legal borrowing capacity and runs out of money with no agreement in sight. Obama has insisted since 2011 that only the Congress has the constitutional authority to authorize borrowing backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. Some legal scholars disagree, as do House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and former president Bill Clinton.

Obama has reiterated recently that he has no intention of going down that road, and it's easy to see why. Because obligations would exceed revenues by more than 30%, he would have to pick and choose among claimants. Republicans would immediately challenge his actions on constitutional grounds, and the case would move swiftly to the Supreme Court, with unpredictable results. And House Republicans would probably begin impeachment proceedings. But if the alternative were chaos and global financial panic, the president might feel compelled to run these risks.

William Galston the Ezra Zilkha governance studies chair at the Brookings Institution. He was a policy advisor to President Clinton, serving as deputy assistant for domestic policy.

Nancy Cohen: "This will end when Republican Speaker John Boehner man's up"

nancy cohen Photograph: Guardian

When President Lyndon B Johnson signed the1964 Civil Rights Act, he reportedly said to his aide Bill Moyers, "We have given away the South for a generation." For decades the Democratic party, under the leadership of the great FDR and the visionary JFK, had temporized with their own extremists: the pro-segregation faction in Congress. LBJ said enough.

To secure passage of the Civil Rights Act, Johnson cut loose southern Democrats and worked closely with northern Republicans. A southerner, a politician's politician, a legendary vote counter, in full possession of his reason, decided to use his much-prized power to do right. At the time, white southerners voted for Democrats by a 10-point margin and accounted for a full one-quarter of Democrats' total national vote. Johnson knew even he had signed away his party's control over the federal government for a generation.

To shutdown the shutdown, the GOP needs its own LBJ. While the moment demands a leader possessing LBJ's combination of political skills and moral clarity, instead, we have Republican Speaker John Boehner, who time and again has demonstrated that he prizes his speaker's gavel more than the public interest.

Imagine LBJ ever saying, as Boehner did Sunday, that there aren't enough votes to pass a clean continuing resolution to reopen the government. The Republican House speaker seems mystified by the historic role of the US House speaker: to lead, not follow, his caucus.

Since the rise of the Tea Party wing of the Republican party, the US has lurched from one crisis to another. It is time to break the fever. As we learned during 2011's debt ceiling crisis, Tea Party ideologues are insatiable. Concede once, and they come back for more. Since this faction takes compromise from Democrats as a sign of weakness, only a Republican, in full knowledge that the responsible members of the party are likely to suffer defeat, can administer the bitter medicine.

Ideally, the shutdown would end with such a bracing, clean, we are done with the politics of perpetual crisis vote. How the shutdown will actually end is another matter, as I doubt Boehner will man up.

Instead, GOP moderates and responsible Democrats will likely offer the speaker a face-saving exit from the crisis du jour. And some months hence, we will find ourselves here again – a prospect utterly demoralizing to those of us outside the Beltway bubble who care little about the delicate egos of our leaders and are yearning for leadership and a return of political sanity.

Nancy L Cohen is the author of Delirium: The Politics of Sex in America. She is a visiting fellow in the History department at Occidental College and is the author of two previous books on American politics.

James Antle: "The Republican leadership never wanted this fight, but the GOP needs a concession from Democrats to end it"

The government shutdown is often portrayed as a two-way fight between the Democrats and Republicans, but it is actually more complicated than that.

While the Democratic message is that the government should reopen as soon as possible, party leaders, including the president, are willing to tolerate a shutdown as long as they think the end result will be breaking the Republicans. President Obama's remarks that markets should be worried about GOP intransigence is aimed as much at the next fight – the debt ceiling extension – as it is the government shutdown.

The Democrats remember the 1990s, when the shutdowns helped save President Bill Clinton's reelection bid and made Newt Gingrich a perennially unpopular figure outside the Republican base. More importantly, the shutdowns cooled the conservatives' reformist zeal and made them less committed to spending cuts.

But the 1996 elections weren't as bad for congressional Republicans as a whole. Remember that the GOP kept its House majority for another decade. I've heard a lot of comparisons to the 1995-96 shutdown, but there are conditions making this different from the '90s. While the shutdown is broadly unpopular, the one faction that supports it – self-described Tea Party supporters – has developed a formidable track record in backing conservative primary challengers to Republican incumbents.

While pluralities blame Republicans for the shutdown, the margins in most polls aren't as decisive as they were in 1996. The World War II memorial closing and Harry Reid's hostile interviews about the GOP's mini-appropriations helped spread some of the public outrage around. And the conservative media blaming the Democrats is no longer limited to just Rush Limbaugh.

What the Republicans lack this time around is an obvious endgame. Bill Clinton was always going to give up some spending cuts; the question was just how many. Is Barack Obama going to make any concessions on Obamacare more consequential than the medical devices tax, if even that? That seems doubtful.

That's where Republican divisions come into play. Moderates and Republicans representing swing districts are starting to make their misgivings known. The conservatives who agree with them – and there are more than you might think – are facing enormous pressure to stay quiet.

The conservatives who want to stand firm, meanwhile, face a question of credibility. They promised that both a shutdown and the Obamcare rollout could be avoided. The opposite has transpired. They need to save face in some way.

The Republican leadership never wanted this fight, and would like to see the Ted Cruz conservatives brought to heel as much as the Obama administration. They need one of two things: a concession from the Democrats or for enough of the rank and file to determine that the Cruz strategy is doomed to let House Speaker John Boehner pass a clean continuing resolution with a bipartisan majority.

Once the debt ceiling is reached, the national consequences are real and the pressure on both sides to hammer out an agreement grows. That's when you might see the medical devices tax fall (part of Obamacare law) and some other compromise made in exchange for relaxing some of the sequestration cuts.

James Antle is editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation, a senior editor at the American Spectator and a contributing editor of the American Conservative.