So yes, the deal that was cut this week was a policy victory much more for Democrats than Republicans. And given the Obama-era GOP’s obstructionist devotion, it’s remarkable that it made it through a Republican-controlled House – remarkable enough to make you wonder what the GOP could possibly have been thinking.

The answer, of course, is that Republicans are convinced they can cut a new deal over the next few months, one that will reflect their zeal for making deep cuts in safety net programs. They believe this because this week’s deal left the big questions about entitlements unresolved. So instead of addressing Medicare and Social Security in the face of a deadline that seemed to give President Obama more leverage, Republicans will now pursue their agenda in the face of three deadlines they think will give them the upper hand: the debt ceiling (which must be addressed by early March), the $1.2 trillion sequester (automatic cuts now slated to be go into effect on March 1) and the continuing resolution that funds the government (due to expire in late March).

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Nick Carey of Reuters reports that in the Senate, Tea Party groups are eyeing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ky., Saxby Chambliss, Ga., Lindsey Graham, S.C., and Lamar Alexander, Tenn., all of whom are up for reelection in 2014.

"Many people here have watched Mitch McConnell's voting record and are dissatisfied with what they've seen," Eric Wilson, executive director of the Tea Party group the Kentucky 9/12 Project, told Reuters. "There are some potential candidates working in the background and doing the right thing."

"If a credible candidate comes forward, then Saxby Chambliss is in major trouble," said Debbie Dooley, a founder of the Atlanta Tea Party.

"I am over 90 percent certain that if there is a reliably conservative candidate in 2014 he will have my total support," Joe Dugan of the Myrtle Beach Tea Party in South Carolina also told Reuters.

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In a New Year's Day drama that climaxed in the middle of the night, the Senate endorsed the legislation by 89-8 early Tuesday. That vote came hours after Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sealed a deal.

It would prevent middle-class taxes from going up but would raise rates on higher incomes. It would also block spending cuts for two months, extend unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless, prevent a 27 percent cut in fees for doctors who treat Medicare patients and prevent a spike in milk prices.

The measure ensures that lawmakers will have to revisit difficult budget questions in just a few weeks, as relief from painful spending cuts expires and the government requires an increase in its borrowing cap.

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Aides to Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell presented the Social Security proposal, which included a method of calculating benefits with inflation. The plan would lower cost of living increases for Social Security recipients. Democrats were swift to reject the offer.

A Democratic aide told ABC News that the proposal was a "poisoned pill" in the current negotiations. However, it should be noted that President Obama has suggested a similar proposal within the context of negotiations on a broad deficit-reduction deal. Such a measure had been taken off the table in discussions over a scaled-back, short-term agreement.

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On “Meet the Press” today, all pretense was gone and diplomacy jettisoned as Obama placed the blame for a potential cliff dive squarely on Republican intransigence. “The only thing I would caution against, David, is I think this notion of, ‘Well, both sides are just kind of unwilling to cooperate.’ And that's just not true,” Obama told host David Gregory.

“I mean if you look at the facts, what you have is a situation here where the Democratic Party, warts and all, and certainly me, warts and all, have consistently done our best to try to put country first,” he added, paraphrasing John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign slogan. The clear implication: Republicans have not put country first, prioritizing ideology instead.

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Instead, their deal, if a deal they indeed cut, will put off some big decisions about tax and entitlement changes and leave other deadlines in place that will likely lead to similar moments of brinkmanship, some in just a matter of weeks.

Republican and Democratic negotiators in the Senate were hoping for a deal as early as Sunday on what threshold to set for increased tax rates, whether to keep current inheritance tax rates and exemptions and how to pay for jobless benefits and avoid cuts in Medicare payments to doctors.

An agreement would halt automatic across-the-board tax increases for virtually every American and perhaps temporarily put off some steep spending cuts in defense and domestic programs.

Gone, however, is the talk of a grand deal that would tackle broad spending and revenue demands and set the nation on a course to lower deficits. Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner were once a couple hundred billion dollars apart of a deal that would have reduced the deficit by more than $2 trillion over ten years.

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While Pelosi described the meeting as "candid and constructive," little sense was given about concrete progress on the unlikely task of reaching a palatable deal.

According to Bloomberg News, President Obama "is seeking an up-or-down vote on his proposal to extend tax cuts for annual income up to $250,000, absent a counteroffer from congressional leaders" -- which basically means that if no counteroffer is put forward that is mutually agreeable, the president will seek a vote on his proposal that everyone must take part in and that cannot be procedurally evaded -- which doesn't sound wildly desperate at all.

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The reality, though, is that it’s probably in both parties’ interest for no deal to emerge from today’s session.

Look at this this way: President Obama has made raising tax rates on high-income Americans his bottom-line demand. He campaigned on it and he won, and the scheduled expiration of all of the Bush tax rates on January 1 gives him added leverage. He initially set the tax hike threshold at $250,000, but in his most recent offer to Republicans, he bumped it up to $400,000 -- in addition to surrendering on a payroll tax extension, accepting a form of chained-CPI for Social Security (essentially, a benefits reduction), reducing his overall demand for new revenue by $400 billion and agreeing to $400 billion in unspecified healthcare (read: Medicare and Medicaid) savings.

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I hope that includes the president.

On a day marked by rumors of action that mainly turned out to be false – thanks in part to a Facebook post by soon-to-be-former Sen. Scott Brown – it was easy to believe the phony blame game that apportions equal responsibility to both sides, even though it's perfectly clear that Democrats have compromised to a fault, while the GOP won't. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid misdiagnosed the problem when he said House Speaker John Boehner was running a "dictatorship" – if he was a dictator, he could have at least passed Plan B. Reid's playing Dueling Floor Rants with the impotent Mitch McConnell could make anyone say "a pox on both their houses."

Of course, Reid was right on one point: The simplest way to resolve at least the looming tax hike problem is for the House to pass the Senate bill that extends the Bush tax cuts for everyone but the top 2 percent of taxpayers. I'm not sure I trust Reid or House Democrats who claim it would get enough Republican votes, plus all the Democrats, to pass the House – never underestimate the power of Tea Party dead-enders in the caucus -- but it would be an interesting test, for all sides.

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The problem, of course, is that the Tea Party’s power resides in Republican primaries, where conservative purists wreaked considerable havoc in the past two election cycles. This included, famously, McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, where the minority leader’s protégé was crushed in a 2010 GOP Senate primary by Rand Paul. Now McConnell has to worry about suffering a similar fate in two years, especially if his handling of the current fiscal impasse evokes cries of treason from the base. How could this square with claims of fading clout for the Tea Party?

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CNN's Lisa Desjardins questioned the Senate minority leader on Capitol Hill about his stance on gun laws in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, and got no response after several follow-ups.

She tweeted the audio, and set the scene: "There are no visuals, but as you listen, realize it was just him and me, walking from the Senate chamber to his office. I was maybe an arm's length away. But, in classic McConnell style, he kept staring forward, ignoring even the awkward silence. It seemed to say a lot."

As Evan McMorris-Santoro of TPM points out, McConnell does not usually take questions from reporters in the Senate halls, but he also did not address the issue during a floor speech on Monday.

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But among elected Republicans, so far it's been mostly radio silence.

On Sunday, David Gregory of Meet the Press said that all of the pro-gun rights senators refused to appear on the show. “A note here this morning: We reached out to all 31 pro-gun rights senators in the new Congress to invite them on the program to share their views on the subject this morning,” he said. ”We had no takers.”

And few have addressed the issue since then.

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Judd, who says she is considering a run in 2014, is trailing 47-43 percent behind McConnell, who happens to be the most unpopular senator in the country.

From PPP:

Only 37% of Kentucky voters approve of him to 55% disapprove. Both in terms of raw disapproval (55%) and net approval (-18) McConnell has the worst numbers of any of his peers, taking that mantle from Nebraska's Ben Nelson.

McConnell is predictably very unpopular with Democrats (23/73). But his numbers are almost as bad with independents (33/58) and even with Republicans he's well below the 70-80% approval range you would usually expect for a Senator within their own party (59/28).

Among Democrats, Judd is the top choice for the primary, with 29 percent of the vote, compared to Lt. Gov. Jerry  Abramson who came in second at 16 percent.

PPP surveyed 1,266 Kentucky voters for the survey overall, and 585 Democratic primary voters.

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The legislation would have given President Obama the authority to raise the debt limit on his own, unless Congress could come up with a two-thirds majority to vote to stop him. The bill was based on a proposal McConnell made last year that would give the president “last-choice option” to avoid a default on the nation's debt.

McConnell proposed a vote on the bill this morning, arguing that Democrats wouldn't have the votes to pass it. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., at first declined, but then called McConnell's bluff this afternoon. This time McConnell blocked the vote.

“The Republican leader objects to his own idea,” Reid said. “So I guess we have a filibuster of his own bill.”

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According to the Wall Street Journal (which got the information from GOP leaders), the President’s opening bid to Republicans is:

— $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenues over the next decade, from limiting tax deductions on the wealthy and raising tax rates on incomes over $250,000 (although those rates don’t have to rise as high as the top marginal rates under Bill Clinton)

— $50 billion in added economic stimulus next year

— A one-year postponement of pending spending cuts in defense and domestic programs

— $400 billion in savings over the decade from Medicare and other entitlement programs  (the same number contained in the President’s 2013 budget proposal, submitted before the election).

— Authority to raise the debt limit without congressional approval.

The $50 billion in added stimulus is welcome. We need more spending in the short term in order to keep the recovery going, particularly in light of economic contractions in Europe and Japan, and slowdowns in China and India.

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1. It’s (probably) unconstitutional: The filibuster appears nowhere in the Constitution and was actually created by accident years later on the advice of the guy who killed Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr.

The Senate didn’t realize it had created a loophole for senators to keep debate open forever until after it was too late, and senators have been trying to get rid of it since 1841. Appropriately, the word "filibuster" comes from the Dutch word for “pirate." In 1917, the Senate created the cloture rule, which allows a supermajority to end a filibuster (the original 67-vote threshold was lowered to the current 60 votes in 1975).

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The other argument is that Democrats are being hypocritical in calling for reform, because they defended the filibuster just a few short years ago when they were in the minority, and thus their efforts should be dismissed out of hand. “Then-Sen. Obama thought it would be wrong to make the changes when the Republicans were in the majority; then-Sen. [Joe] Biden thought it was a bad idea when the Democrats were in the minority; and Harry Reid thought it was an awful idea when he was in the minority because he said no one group should be able to run roughshod over the other group,” said Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso, who holds the No. 4 position in the GOP leadership.

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Well, not quite nothing. Majority Leader Harry Reid hasn’t detailed his precise reform proposal yet, but it’s likely to feature two main components: 1) Eliminating filibusters on the motion to proceed – meaning that it would take a simple majority vote to bring a bill to the floor for debate; and 2) forcing senators who want to block legislation to engage in actual talking filibusters.

But in an exchange on the Senate floor with an exercised Mitch McConnell Monday afternoon, Reid went out of his way to stress that “we’re not trying to get rid of the filibuster.” Which is why life in the Senate as we’ve come to know it isn’t going to suddenly change in January when Democrats use the “constitutional option” to change the filibuster rules with a simple majority vote.

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According to Pew, when voters were asked whether "Republicans leaders in Congress should" either "work with Obama" or "stand up to Obama," only 46 percent of Republicans said they should work with him, and 50 percent said they should stand up to him.

On the flip side, 54 percent of Democrats said Obama should work with Republican leadership, and 42 percent said he should stand up to them.

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