Senate

The 59-41 vote tabled the bill passed by the House less than two hours before.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) ordered a vote requesting the presence of every senator in the chamber late Friday evening.

Prior to that vote Reid attempted to do-away with a quorum call in the upper chamber in order to speak. His unanimous consent request, however, was objected to my Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) apparently by orders of the Republican cloakroom.

Several Republican senators came to the floor in the lead-up the House vote on Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) deficit reduction plan Friday afternoon to urge a reasoned approach to avoiding a default crisis.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced Friday afternoon that he would hold the Senate open into the evening while awaiting a vote in the House on Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) deficit-reduction plan.

With the nation’s financial future still uncertain, Senate committees will continue to push forward with a number of comparatively mundane matters next week, including an examination of military strategy in Afghanistan, a mysterious closed Army Services Committee hearing on “cyber issues” and an exploration on a nationwide alert system to spread information when law enforcement officers are injured or killed in the line of duty.

A list of featured committee hearings scheduled for next week follows:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) slammed President Obama from the Senate floor on Friday, accusing the president of putting his own reelection prospects before the good of the country.

“The president said, really this is what the president said a week ago, ‘The only bottom line that I have is that we extend this debt ceiling through the next election, until 2013.’” claimed Sessions, who is the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee. 

Republicans' addition of the balanced-budget amendment to Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio.) deficit-reduction plan is proof they are not serious about averting the looming crisis, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Budget, said on Friday.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the floor Friday morning to blast the Democratic majority in the Senate for failing to propose a solution to the looming deficit crisis that could pass either house. 

“Democrats here in the Senate have offered no solutions that could pass either chamber, not one," said McConnell. “Instead, all day yesterday we got chest-thumping comments about how we are going to kill any legislation that comes from the House.”

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the Senate will “have to wait until tomorrow to do our work.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) recessed the Senate Thursday night while it awaits news from the House on whether or not there will be a vote on Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) deficit-reduction plan.

House Republican leadership postponed the vote indefinitely earlier in the afternoon as they scrambled to whip together enough votes for it to clear the lower chamber.

Reid said he expects no action in either body before 9 p.m.