Maybe I’m naive, but this article by Bruce Ackerman makes a lot of sense to me:

Dire warnings of a crisis serve the interests of both Democrats and Republicans as they try to bludgeon one another into a last-minute deal on the debt ceiling. But that doesn’t mean the warnings are valid. There is zero—chance that the United States will default on its debt even under the worst-case scenario. More fundamentally, it is wrong to look upon the current impasse as a symptom of a deeper crisis of governability.

Despite claims to the contrary, this standoff is not unprecedented. It is a pale rerun of the Newt Gingrich-Bill Clinton confrontation over the federal budget in 1995 and 1996. The last time around, the Republicans posed a far stronger challenge to their Democratic antagonist in the White House. During Clinton’s first two years in office, they managed to beat back the president’s health care program, and capitalized on this remarkable victory by sweeping both houses of Congress. Though it may seem like ages ago, recall that President Obama succeeded on health care where President Clinton failed, and that the Republicans won only one chamber of Congress in 2010. (In 1994, they won both.)

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE