How it ends

With only three days left until a possible government shutdown, nobody — not even those in charge — know how the budget battle will end. Or if it will end.

The scenarios are all very messy and each would trigger either an immediate crisis or set the stage for an even more damaging showdown over the debt limit.

House Republicans are in disarray as the leadership discards one strategy after another, unable to unify the conference. The Senate is likely to leave town Friday after sending a funding bill back to the House that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has already said he can’t accept.

For his part, President Barack Obama is waiting on the sidelines for the Republicans to figure out their next move.

And the debt ceiling increase that’s needed by mid-October further complicates the endgame for congressional leaders.

The lack of any serious negotiations — and any clarity whatsoever — so close to the Oct. 1 deadline to renew government funding appear to increase the likelihood of a shutdown. But it’s not yet a foregone conclusion.

Aside from total capitulation by either side, here’s POLITICO’s look at how it all might end.

Republicans fold now — and fight later on the debt limit

The GOP suffers from PTSD when it comes to government shutdowns. It took the political hit for the last one, in 1995-96, and many members worry about history repeating itself.

That’s why Republicans could decide to accept a clean funding bill, keep the government open and move on — demanding to curtail, delay or defund Obamacare in exchange for raising the debt limit next month.

The House Republican leadership’s opening move last week suggests this scenario is quite possible.

They initially floated a plan to pass a government funding bill that would’ve allowed the Senate to strip out the language defunding Obamacare without ever having to send it back to the House for final approval. It was a tacit admission that the Republican leaders wanted to give House members a chance to reject the health care law without the risk of a government shutdown. But the rank and file, well aware that it was a procedural maneuver, refused to go along.

For the tea party wing of the Republican Party to back down now, Boehner would need convince members that the debt limit fight won’t leave them similarly empty-handed. And if Republicans accept a clean CR now, they would likely be forced to pass a full fiscal year 2014 spending plan in mid-November.

Republicans think the debt limit provides better leverage for extracting concessions. For starters, it polls better than shutting down the government over Obamacare.

A new Bloomberg News poll found that 61 percent of Americans agree that it’s “right to require spending cuts when the debt ceiling is raised even if it risks default.” But a CNBC poll said Americans don’t want to defund Obamacare if it means a default.

The problem for Republicans is that Obama insists he won’t give up anything in return. White House aides and congressional Democrats don’t believe that Republicans will ever allow the country to go into default because the economic damage would be severe, so why would they negotiate?

Not only that, Obama views this round of debt-limit chicken as a highly consequential moment.

“We cannot live in a world where one half of one branch of government can extract their demands that are rejected by voters and can’t pass under normal circumstances, or they’re going to blow up the economy,” said White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer on CNN’s “The Lead.”

Boehner cannot agree to a clean funding bill at this point. He said as much Thursday morning, when he all but ruled out passing the Senate measure.

That hard line could soften if Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) cannot pass a debt ceiling increase with 217 Republicans.

They had planned to put the debt limit hike — tied to a laundry list of conservative priorities — up for a vote this weekend, They hoped to show members that whatever they couldn’t achieve on the government spending bill, they could try to accomplish when the nation reached its borrowing limit in mid-October.

But again, rank-and-file Republicans didn’t buy into the strategy.

And by late Thursday, the leadership was moving on to a Plan C, whatever that may be.

Buy more time

Boehner could deploy a temporary escape hatch.

Here’s how it would work: The House would take up the Senate’s funding bill, add another provision that takes aim at Obamacare and then send it back to the Senate alongside a short extension to keep the government running for another week or so.

It would allow Republicans to keep up the fight on health care while avoiding an imminent shutdown.

“When they run out of time in Congress, they tend to buy themselves more time,” said Steve Bell, a former aide to Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and senior director of the Economic Policy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

It seems likely that House Republicans could attach a provision to cut subsidies for the health care of congressional lawmakers and their staff. Senate Democrats wouldn’t accept it, but there also wouldn’t be enough time for the Senate to pass it before the Oct. 1 deadline. Controversial legislation can take days to move through procedural hurdles. The Senate, however, is likely to approve a short-term measure relatively quickly.

This option presents problems for Congress, the White House and the economy. A delay of a week or two would bump the deadline for government funding right up against the debt ceiling, upping the fiscal stakes even more.

“The CR, at that point, becomes pretty indistinguishable from the debt limit,” Bell said.

It’s also unclear what another week will do to resolve political differences. The same fault lines will still exist just seven or 14 days from now.

Go over the ledge

The government shutdown threat has hung over Washington since the 2010 election ushered dozens of tea party Republicans into Congress on the promise of slicing federal spending.

So just let them go ahead and do it, some Democrats concede privately.

This is their reasoning: Tea party Republicans would get what they’ve been clamoring for, GOP leaders would prove once and for all that the public doesn’t like it one bit — and in their hobbled state, Republicans would agree to renew government funding and raise the debt limit.

“A shutdown may be the best option,” said Stan Collender, a former House and Senate budget aide who now works for Qorvis Communications.

If the government closes for any period of time, it would weaken Boehner’s hand. No one believes he would then mount a big debt ceiling fight. His party would be reeling from the impacts of a shutdown — all polls point to Republicans shouldering most of the blame.

Of course, the public is used to partisan fighting and an ineffective Congress, so the political fallout from a shutdown might not be as bad as political leaders fear — at least in the short term.

“The politics of the shutdown will change dramatically after a few days,” Collender said. “People will go from amused to annoyed to mad.”