Senate GOP blocks Reid debt bill
Updated: 2:24 p.m. ET
Senate Republicans blocked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's Democratic bill to raise the debt ceiling on Sunday, voting 50-49 against advancing the measure. Democrats fell 10 votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.
Democrats who voted against cloture were sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Reid. Reid switched his vote from yea to nay in order to keep the vehicle of the bill pending and available if and when a compromise is reached.
Republican Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., broke party lines and voted for cloture.
Special Section: America's Debt Battle
Focus will now move to ongoing negotiations between President Obama and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who are working on a deal that would extend the debt limit through 2012 and cut up to $3 trillion in spending during the next 10 years.
McConnell said Sunday that Republicans and White House negotiators were "very close" to a deal on raising the debt ceiling and that an agreement that would prevent the nation from defaulting on its loans was "just within our reach."
The $3 trillion in cuts would come in two waves. The first wave would include $1 trillion in reductions, and a bipartisan "super congressional committee" would need to determine the second round of cuts by Thanksgiving of 2012. If Congress fails to act on the second round, there would be automatic "trigger" cuts to defense spending and entitlements.
McConnell said that the committee, which would be made up of equal parts Republican and Democratic lawmakers, would take a "broad look at the most serious problems" in government spending in order to determine what the second round of cuts would encompass. He noted that the committee would have the authority to raise revenues and enact tax reform.
House Speaker John Boehner told CBS News he would present a framework for the deal to House Republicans on a Sunday afternoon conference call, but said he "didn't know" what he would tell them.
"Depends on getting it tied down," he told CBS News Capitol Hill producer Jill Jackson.
When asked if the option of closing tax loopholes and ending subsides for oil companies and corporate jet owners was on the table, Boehner said, "you know better."
A Boehner aide told CBS that House Republicans don't plan to accept that option.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the third most powerful Democrat in the Senate, said on the show that he felt "a lot better today" about Congress' ability to come up with a deal to avoid default "than I did even yesterday morning."
But he emphasized that "nothing is done yet" and that there were "lots of decisions yet to be made."
"We haven't even seen it yet," Schumer said, of the deal in progress. "(Senate Majority Leader Harry) Reid and Democrats in the Senate have not signed off on this deal. We don't even know what all the details are. So we're not yet ready to try and urge anybody to be for it."
