Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) debt reduction bill looks likely to pass in the House of Representatives today. Of course it still has to make it through the Senate and past President Barack Obama's oft-threatened veto so there's no victory for the Republicans and the nation yet. But there have already been significant defeats for Mr. Obama and the Democrats.

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Even the left-leaning MSNBC admits, "it's obvious how much ground the White House and Democrats have conceded." Those obvious concessions include giving up on a clean raise in the debt ceiling, giving in to the idea that any raise comes with equal or greater spending cuts and abandoning their demand that 'revenues' (a.k.a. tax hikes) be included in the final deal - the latest plan from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) excludes them.

This leaves just one element of the solution on which the president and/or Congressional Democrats have yet to concede - timing. They are still demanding that the debt ceiling be raised in a single step that would allow the government to keep on borrowing and keep on spending beyond the 2012 election. Rather than the more restrained and responsible two-step approach in the Boehner Bill, this purely political demand is meant to keep the nation's rising debt and the government's over-spending off the front pages while Candidate Obama tries to hide from President Obama's dismal economic record.

Our country is already suffering from this president's obscenely expensive mistakes (the $800 billion stimulus and Obamacare to name just two), yet he continues to try to con the American people with bogus default deadlines and empty threats so he can make even more. He uses the word "balanced" not in the responsible sense of balancing the budget but in the redistribution of wealth sense of taking from those who create jobs and spending it on more of his job-killing ideas.

While many on the left continue to call for compromise on this debt issue, I am reminded of the words of Mohandas Gandhi, "All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take." In politics, the belief that our government should be responsible with our money is about as fundamental as it gets.