Published by: Robert Laurie on Thursday January 3rd, 2013

By ROBERT LAURIE - Obama doesn't want a fight.  Will he get one?

Tuesday night, after the passage of the fiscal cliff deal, Barack Obama went on the offense regarding his insatiable need to raise the debt ceiling.

“While I will negotiate over many things," The President said. "I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed.”

It appears Obama has reached the end of his boundless generosity.  He's tired of constantly giving, and he's not willing to make concessions when it's so painfully obvious that the country needs to be placed deeper in debt.

 Unfortunately, he's got trouble brewing. He may not want a debt-ceiling fight, but Mitch McConnell is vowing to give him one.  In an op/ed published at Yahoo News, the Senate Majority leader promised that it was finally time to deal with spending.

 "We simply cannot increase the nation’s borrowing limit without committing to long overdue reforms to spending programs that are the very cause of our debt.

The only way to achieve the balance the President claims to want is by cutting spending. As he himself has admitted, no amount of tax hikes or revenue could possibly keep up with the amount of money Washington is projected to spend in the coming years. At some point, high taxes become such a drag on the economy that the revenue stalls.

While most Washington Democrats may want to deny it, the truth is, the only thing we can do to solve the nation’s fiscal problem is to tackle government spending head on — and particularly, spending on health care programs, which appear to take off like a fighter jet on every chart available that details current trends in federal spending.

The President may not want to have a fight about government spending over the next few months, but it’s the fight he is going to have, because it’s a debate the country needs. For the sake of our future, the President must show up to this debate early and convince his party to do something that neither he nor they have been willing to do until now. Over the next two months they need to deliver the same kind of bipartisan resolution to the spending problem we have now achieved on revenue — before the 11th hour.

When it comes to spending, the time has come to rise above the special interest groups that dominate the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in Washington and act, without drama or delay. The President likes to say that most Americans support tax hikes on the rich. What he conveniently leaves out is that even more Americans support cuts."

That's nice to hear but, knowing the GOP track record, is it really something we can believe?  If we're serious about solving the "very cause of our debt," we're talking about massive, across-the-board, spending cuts.

Given that we've just come out of an election where the promise of "free stuff from the government" virtually guaranteed victory for Barack Obama how much political willpower does the GOP have?  If the performance of John Boehner and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is any indication, there's precious little backbone in the current version of the Grand Old Party.

We'd all love to take McConnell at his word, but we've heard this song and dance before.  Usually it ends with some sort of squishy compromise that gives Obama exactly what he wants. How many times are we expected to get willingly burned by the promises?

If Mitch is really up for the fight, conservatives will be there to back him.  However, he can no longer expect his base to take his proclamations at face value.

We've been let down far too many times.