Mark Summer gives us the question that many readers will view as sensible:
"I've got another idea: we get a clean bill to raise the debt ceiling, then work to bring down the deficit without a gun to the nation's collective skull."
The difficulty with this approach is that one of the Republican factions spent much of the last decade spewing variants on this line at the Republican Party's other faction,
because they were confident that the other faction could be treated like idiots forever and there would be no negative consequences within the Republican Party.
They were wrong.
Now half of the Republican Party really does not trust its own leaders. There is a reason why, for all the complaining "RINO" as an attack label is much more heated than readers here who attack someone as a "DINO". That reason is that history: RINOs assumed they could treat their own base as morons. (Most of you can name Democrats who are exceptions to my generalizations and lost primaries.)
Republicans, no, we, now have as a significant part of their Republican people in Congress who are absolutely certain that there are two major alternatives out there:
1) The country ends its Federal deficit soon, if need be by staging a repeating the the Long Depression of 1875-1895 (exact year boundaries are up to you).
2) The country becomes one with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and
being normal Americans offered this choice they view (1) as the better alternative. The people on the other side of the table don't appear to recognize what choices are perceived by the other side.
As I said in an earlier comment, one side says 'Tornado on front lawn; go to the basement' and the other side says 'house on fire, get outside', with neither side interested in looking at the other side's symptoms, the smoke and the loud noise.
As a result, most of the people with whom Democrats would like to negotiate, other than Demint and Cantor, are in the position where they must behave as thought they agree that points 1 and 2 are the alternatives, or they face a primary that they will probably lose.
To make matters more fun, we now see the opposite side to the coin 'the Senate cools off sudden enthusiasms' namely 'the Senate keeps the ship of state from changing course rapidly when torpedoes are sighted'.
No, I do not believe that there is always a solution.
I would, however, suggest that the Bush policy 'what this country needs is a short, victorious war' works as well as it did in the Weber Science Fiction novel of the same name.