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By all accounts, it looks like a deal is about to be announced in which the debt ceiling is hiked in exchange for the promise of major spending cuts, including to entitlements, totalling at least $2.4 trillion. Anything can happen, but it apppears the GOP is on the verge of pulling off a political victory that may be unprecedented in American history. Republicans may succeed in using the threat of a potential outcome that they themselves acknowledged would lead to national catastrophe as leverage to extract enormous concessions from Democrats, without giving up anything of any significance in return. Not...

(Reuters) - Democrats in the House of Representatives might decide not to support a last-minute deal to raise the debt ceiling when they meet on Monday, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday.

Trying to stay away from the 72 per cent relative humidity that had contributed to a blisteringly uncomfortable day in Washington on Friday, a half dozen employees of a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria were getting ready for another busy night in Capitol Hill. Four blocs away, Senate Democrats were about to kill a House-passed debt limit increase bill less than two hours after it squeaked through the House. If agreement is not reached on raising the debt limit by Tuesday, the US risks a potentially catastrophic debt default. To meet the deadline, America's elected representatives and their staffs have been working through...

Liberal Dem lawmaker vows to reject GOP, White House debt dealBy Julian Pecquet - 07/31/11 04:04 PM ET One of the most liberal members of Congress vowed Sunday to reject an emerging debt-ceiling compromise among lawmakers and the White House, calling it a “cure as bad as the disease.” Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement that progressive lawmakers and working families “were thrown under the bus” by a deal that “trades peoples' livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals.” The result, he said, is as bad for the...

Late Saturday night, ABC News and National Journal reported that the outline of a deal had been reached by congressional leaders and the White House. ABC's Jonathan Karl reports that "Democratic and Republican Congressional sources involved in the negotiations" tell him that these are the key elements of the deal: •A debt ceiling increase of up to $2.1 to $2.4 trillion (depending on the size of the spending cuts agreed to in the final deal). •They have now agreed to spending cuts of roughly $1.2 trillion over 10 years. •The formation of a special Congressional committee to recommend further deficit...

Back in 1994, Rush Limbaugh wrote See I Told You So. From page 88 of the book: [T]he cure for: a) the budget deficit = more taxes; b) unemployment = more taxes; c) recession = more taxes; d) environmental problems = more taxes; e) illiteracy = more taxes; f) L.A. riots = more taxes. It doesn’t matter what the nature of the problem is. This week, whether you listened to Rush, Sean, Mark, or even me filling in for Boortz, we’ve been telling you so. This whole farce in Washington is a way to get more tax revenue from you...

PJTV catches up with CNN contributor and radio host Dana Loesch at the Smart Girl Summit in St. Louis, MO to get her reaction to the Tea Party 'hobbits' and their role in the debt ceiling negotiations

Very late on Saturday, multiple reports sketched out the framework of a debt limit compromise President Obama has struck with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). As noted here, the issue under contention was the design of a so-called "trigger," -- a penalty written into the bill meant to encourage Congress to pass further bipartisan deficit reduction legislation, authored by a new Special Committee, later this year. Here's what they've reportedly come up with, pending approval from Congressional Democrats and Republicans. From ABC News, the key detail: "The special committee must make recommendations by late November (before Congress' Thanksgiving recess)....

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Saturday he and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) are fully engaged with the White House on a debt deal and expressed optimism an agreement will be reached.  “I’ve spoken with the president and the vice president within the last hour and a half," McConnell said at a press conference with Boehner shortly after the House rejected Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) debt-ceiling plan.  "We are now fully engaged with the one person … who can sign a bill into law,” McConnell told reporters.  Fewer than three days before the Aug. 2 deadline for...

Washington, D.C. – Nevada Senator Harry Reid made the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding the only viable debt ceiling compromise to avert a default. Below are his remarks as prepared for delivery:Republicans leaders in the House of Representatives wasted this week pursuing a right-wing proposal they knew from the start could not pass the Senate.From the very beginning the Speaker’s Band-Aid approach was fatally flawed – it would have put us back in this incredible position, fighting the clock to prevent financial collapse, in just a few weeks.It was a concession to Tea Party extremists, yet it...

10:56am | Good Saturday morning. The House and Senate will convene at 1pm today. The House will likely go out of session after a vote on the Reid plan to raise the debt limit, while the Senate will stick around until 1 am Sunday to vote to end debate on the plan. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/live-coverage-congressional-debt-ceiling-showdown-2011-7#ixzz1TbPkr4wi

MajoratNJ Boehner 2 of 2: "We are dealing with reasonable, responsible people who want this crisis to end as quickly as possible and I think we will.” 33 minutes ago

The Senate adjourned late Friday night without an agreed-upon framework for raising the debt limit. Shortly before this, a source passed to TPM a blueprint of what Democrats hope will be the way out of this imbroglio. It's a copy of what could be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's final offer to Republicans in the debt limit standoff. The gist: Reid hopes to entice Republicans to support his plan in two ways. First, with slightly deeper cuts. Second, by adopting an idea, first proposed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, that would delegate the authority to raise the debt limit...

Just days ahead of the Aug. 2 debt ceiling deadline and as partisan rankling continued on Capitol Hill, President Barack Obama urged Congress to show him a plan that would divert the country from national default by Tuesday. In the weekly address to the nation, the president maintained that House Republicans had wasted too much time passing a bill that doesn’t offer a long-term solution to the debt crisis. Speaker John Boehner’s deficit ceiling bill passed late Friday, but within hours it was tabled by the Senate. The House plan, Obama argued, would expose the country to another impasse in...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has revised his plan to raise the debt limit in a last-ditch bid to attract Republican support. The biggest change is that Reid would give the president almost unilateral power to raise the debt limit, borrowing an idea introduced by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Reid would have President Obama request a $2.4 trillion debt-limit increase in two installments of $1.2 trillion each. The requests would be subject to congressional resolutions of disapproval, but these would do little to restrict the president.

The Senate voted to kill a House-approved bill to raise the debt ceiling, leaving the ball in the court of Senate leadership to produce a deficit reduction bill, with just days before the Aug. 2 deadline. The vote was 59-41. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid followed through on his promise to kill the bill, pushed through the House a day late by House Speaker John Boehner. The White House, which has thrown its weight behind a Reid proposal, had promised to veto the bill had it miraculously passed the Senate. The Senate also killed the Cut, Cap, Balance Act last...

House Republicans will bring up Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s debt limit package Saturday just to vote it down, an attempt to show that the legislation is dead in the lower chamber, according to GOP leadership sources. Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) debt limit package passed the House Friday with 218 votes. The Boehner plan would raise the debt limit by $900 billion, requiring another vote to boost the government’s borrowing authority early next year by another $1.6 trillion. Reid and other Senate Democratic leaders have already declared the Boehner plan dead-on-arrival in the Senate. In order to show Reid’s package...

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The House plans on voting on Speaker John Boehner's debt limit plan this evening, but with its demise imminent in the Senate, some Senate Republicans are considering getting behind Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's alternative plan. "I voted for cut, cap, and balance,'" Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts said today, in reference to the House Republicans' initial debt limit plan. "I'll vote for Boehner, and I'll vote for Reid. I've already said that. We need to move our country forward. It's time." Senate Democrats have promised to reject Boehner's plan, which would only extend the nation's borrowing authority for...

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday that President Obama’s debt ceiling plan is the best-known option at this point. There’s just one problem with that: No publicly available, detailed Obama plan exists. “There is no plan that has been offered, certainly in the last several months, about which more detail is known or has been specified than the Obama-Boehner plan, okay, in terms of the cuts in domestic spending, both defense and non-defense discretionary; the savings coming out of entitlements programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; the kind of tax reform that was envisioned and the mechanisms...