Via FoxNews.com

After months of bipartisan debt-reduction talks, the Super Committee said Monday that it will be unable to agree on terms to save $1.2 trillion over 10 years by tonight's midnight deadline.

"Despite our inability to bridge the committee's significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation's fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve," a statement from co-chairs of the committee read.

A last-ditch meeting of lawmakers ended Monday afternoon with no smiles, no comments, but some vivid body language. Even a visit to the White House by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., co-chairwoman of the panel of 12 came and went without comment.

With Republican sources telling Fox News it's just a matter of timing an announcement to the market close, for some, the latest comes as no surprise.

The sequester was designed and voted on by both parties and signed by the president, "specifically to be onerous," said White House spokesman Jay Carney. "It was designed so that it never came to pass."

Carney added that despite President Obama's willingness "to take extraordinary steps and to bring his party along with them ... in the end, Republicans walked away from that deal," he added.

But that's not how Republican lawmakers see it.

"The Republican House laid out a good plan. The president, except for his irresponsible budget and the Republican Senate, has done nothing to lay out a plan that can be analyzed by the American people," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee.

"The commander-in-chief is absent from battle," he told Fox News.

Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., said Congress should consider turning the negative into a positive.

"I'm deeply disappointed by the failure of the Super Committee to find an agreement for at least $1.2 trillion in cuts," he said in a statement. "But the question now is can we still find a better solution than the across-the-board cuts that have already been agreed to and I think we can. What the Congress cannot do is to ignore the August agreement for cutting the deficit no matter how difficult that might be. That would be fundamentally dishonest."

The panel had until midnight to come up with a plan for reducing the federal debt by $1.2 tillion over 10 years or face automatic cuts, called "sequestration." Failure to do so would violate the law that demanded that the Congressional Budget Office come up with a fiscal evaluation of the plan and give Congress two days to review it before the Nov. 23 deadline. The task was supposed to be wrapped up by Dec. 23 with an unamended vote on the package.

Despite last-ditch claims of "hope" from negotiators, somber Republican Super Committee members, Sens. Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rob Portman of Ohio, didn't offer any great hope that the deal had been struck when they walked out of fellow member John Kerry's Senate office on Monday afternoon.

Now lawmakers are looking for alternatives to a plan that is designed to chop equally from domestic and entitlement programs on one end, and defense on the other.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., say they are writing legislation to prevent what they say would be devastating cuts to the military. Democrats maintain they won't let domestic programs be the sole source of savings.

For Kerry, D-Mass., the failure comes from a refusal of Republicans to raise taxes on the highest-earning Americans.

"Revenues are at a 60-year low. They're at 14 or 15 percent of all of our GDP. Traditionally they're at 18 percent, 19," Kerry said. "Fair and balanced is not giving the wealthiest people in America tax cuts while you ask people on Medicare and Medicaid to pony up more. ... The only thing blocking us is the insistence on the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy."

But Kyl told Fox News on Monday that Democrats want to raise taxes regardless of whether it's necessary.

The committee could do its work in halves. For instance, if the panel produces less than $1.2 trillion in savings, automatic cuts are activated to make up the difference. So $800 billion in savings from the Super Committee would trigger $400 billion in automatic cuts.

By law, 18 percent of the automatic savings are assumed to come from interest costs the government would save from reducing the debt. If the Super Committee fails completely, out of the $1.2 trillion in automatic savings, $216 billion would be assumed interest savings.

That would leave $984 billion in automatic spending cuts over 10 years. That works out to around $55 billion annually each from defense and domestic programs though a CBO analysis shows that comes out to 10 percent of the Pentagon budget in 2013 alone, a huge hit.

On the domestic side, the law exempts Social Security, Medicaid and many veterans' benefits and low-income programs. It also limits Medicare to a 2 percent reduction. That leaves education, agriculture and the environment programs exposed to cuts of around 8 percent in 2013, according to the CBO. For many Democrats, those are cuts worth fighting against, especially if Republicans try protecting defense programs.

For those on the outside, failure is not a terrible outcome.

"Ordinary Americans should breathe a sigh of relief because we dodged a bullet," Greenlining Institute General Counsel Samuel S. Kang said in a statement. "We could achieve most of the deficit reduction goal by simply shutting down offshore corporate tax havens ... We should make America's richest companies pay their fair share before even thinking about slashing vital programs."

"Given the alternatives, which were phony spending cuts and higher taxes on producers and job creators, sequestration is by far the better deal," said Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson. "There should be no discussion of revenue reform until there are actual spending cuts on the table. All we see now are reductions in the growth of spending. What a farce."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

By Marin Cogan, POLITICO

In the midst of the Republican revolution of 1995, more than 70 House Democrats and 228 Republicans embraced a balanced-budget amendment — a show of bipartisanship over the nation’s fiscal future that today seems unimaginable.

Now the GOP is taking another shot at the amendment in 2011, and some of the same Democrats who said “yes” 16 years ago are saying “no way” this time around.

The difference has little to do with the principles of a balanced budget. Democrats just don’t trust the Republicans of 2011. They blame the GOP for the country’s fiscal condition and the Democrats don’t care that they’re being accused of flip-flopping.

Minority Whip Steny Hoyer — a yes vote in 1995 — is unapologetically whipping against the 2011 version of the balanced-budget amendment, which will see a vote in the House later this week.

When asked whether he thought the vote would be difficult for Democrats, Hoyer barked back at Republicans that have been attacking him all week. “Tough votes are paying for things. It’s not a tough vote to pretend you’re going to go for a balanced budget by having something like that on the floor,” Hoyer said.

“If you want to fight a war — pay for it. If you want to have a prescription drug program — pay for it. If you want to have tax cuts, if you want to cut revenues, make sure you have the guts to cut spending commensurate with cuts in taxes. If you don’t have that courage, then don’t criticize others for saying we need to pay for things. You don’t need an amendment to do it,” he added.

As lawmakers from both sides of the aisle wring their hands over the state of play on the deficit committee, the politics of this week’s balanced-budget amendment vote are also instructive: They show just how bad things have gotten in this gridlocked Congress.

That is to say nothing of the policy fights — on the right, conservatives are condemning the irresponsibility of Republicans because the bill doesn’t require a supermajority to raise taxes; while liberals are calling out moderate Democrats for a bill they say would crush the economy and require deep cuts in social welfare programs.

Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), who supports the amendment, summed it up: “If it does not pass the House and Senate, I think it will speak volumes about the dysfunction of Congress.”

Democrats aren’t the only ones frustrated with the apparent inability of the parties to find agreement.

“To think that 1995 was better is kind of a depressing commentary on Congress,” said one senior Republican aide. “This is so exhausting.”

In theory, plenty of moderate Democrats might support the idea of a balanced budget, given the country’s debt crisis. But members of both parties say that the difficulty winning bipartisan support for this amendment — which got two-thirds of the House in 1995 — is evidence of the extent of the breakdown of trust and lack of bipartisanship choking Congress.

Caught in the middle of the debate are the Blue Dog Democrats and moderates who supported a balanced budget in the past, and who will be essential for Republicans to meet the two-thirds threshold required for passage. Republicans say they hope to get about 50 Democrats. There are 11 current House Democrats who voted for the bill in 1995, including Hoyer and Assistant Democratic Leader Jim Clyburn.

Republicans spent the early part of the week gleefully attacking Democrats who previously backed the amendment in their press releases and Twitter feeds.

Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte, who introduced the bill, said: “It’s ironic that the reason [Hoyer] claims for whipping against it is that Republicans are too partisan. Here [we] made a decision to come forward with a very bipartisan proposal that will have Republican support.”

The Republican version of the balanced-budget amendment isn’t even the tough version conservatives wanted. The preferred version of the constitutional amendment for fiscal conservatives would require a two-thirds supermajority to raise taxes. The amendment heading for a vote is a simpler, “clean” version that would require only a simple majority to raise taxes.

Republicans agreed to go with the easier version. But it also contains a three-fifths majority to raise the debt ceiling — a measure that after this summer’s debt standoff has Democrats cringing.

“To me and a lot of my colleagues just having been through this horrible experience of the debt ceiling increase, where we could barely get the votes for a simple majority, a three-fifths gets to be really dysfunctional,” said Rep. John Carney (D-Del.), a moderate freshman who’s introduced his own balanced-budget proposal.

Speaking of his prior support for the amendment, Hoyer said that he didn’t anticipate the changes in the political discourse in 1995 — beginning with the government shutdowns over spending later that year and continuing through the debt ceiling crisis this summer.

“I did not contemplate the irresponsibility that I’ve seen fiscally over the last eight years in the Bush administration and Republican leadership in the House and Senate,” Hoyer said. “And these last few months where Republicans took America to the brink of default and placed the confidence of the world in America’s fiscal judgment in question.”

Vermont Democratic Rep. Peter Welch, a Hoyer ally, said he thought there was “a certain irony that people get all excited about this amendment but won’t take the actions required now that would have the effect of implementing the outcome of a balanced budget.”

Not every Democrat is behind Hoyer.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), a yes vote in 1995, circulated a letter among his colleagues this week urging them to buck their party leaders and support the amendment. DeFazio said he knew that the partisan fights over the debt ceiling this summer had spoiled many of his colleagues’ appetites for a balanced-budget amendment.

“I understand that last summer’s fight over the debt limit, which was ginned up and just a political event to force the president into the corner, has soured some relations. But the fundamentals haven’t changed,” DeFazio said. “We need to force people around here to make decisions. All you need to do is watch the pathetic so-called supercommittee struggling to find a mere $1.2 trillion over 10 years to know we need to have a form that makes us make those tough decisions.”

DeFazio has allies in the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, which formally bucked their leadership Wednesday in announcing they’d support the bill. Unfortunately for Republicans, there aren’t that many Blue Dogs left in Congress this time around.

“Those of you following the Blue Dog Coalition know we were advancing a balanced-budget amendment when balanced-budget amendments weren’t cool,” Ross, a leader of the group, told reporters in announcing the support of the caucus.

Even with the votes of the 24 Blue Dogs in Congress, balanced-budget backers will have a tough time finding enough Democratic support to reach the two-thirds threshold. And the bill faces almost no chance in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid has called similar proposals “radical.”

“Quite frankly, it sounds like most of the Democratic leadership is voting against this amendment. That’s unfortunate,” said Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah.) “It’s not what the public is looking for, collectively. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. We should come together and take steps to get the country back on the appropriate path.”

By Bill McGuire, ABC News

Don’t look now, members of the “supercommittee” battling the national debt, but the amount the U.S. owes topped the $15 trillion mark Wednesday afternoon.

That’s a lot of George Washingtons, as you can see here live at USdebtclock.org.

With a week until the committee’s deadline to reach agreement on cutting $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion from the federal deficit over the next 10 years, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction still has no agreement to stem automatic cuts to the budget.

A Democrat on a special deficit-cutting supercommittee Wednesday questioned whether Republicans are still interested in negotiating after the panel’s top GOP member said Republicans have “gone as far as we feel we can go” on tax hikes, the Associated Press reported.

A sense of deep pessimism has gripped the supercommittee, and judging from the limited public statement by panel members, a debt bargain could be out of reach.

“We need to find out whether our Republican colleagues want to continue to negotiate or whether they’ve drawn a hard line in the sand,” said supercommittee member Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland. “The question is whether they’ve kind of said ‘take it or leave it.’ ”

The deficit has ballooned to nearly $48,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. This year alone, the U.S. will spend $1.3 trillion more than it takes in.

The debt has expanded at an alarming pace, from $7.5 trillion in 2004 and $5.6 trillion in 2000. At the current rate, Debtclock.org reckons that the debt will top $23 trillion in 2015, though the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts the estimate at $17.6 trillion.

Back in August after a protracted fight, Congress voted to raised the national-debt ceiling by $2.7 trillion to $17 trillion, while requiring $2.7 trillion in deficit reduction by 2021.

Compared with other developed nations, the U.S. has a debt to GDP ratio of 85 percent, compared with Germany at 74 percent and Japan at a whopping 194 percent. World debt clocks can be found here.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Via FoxNews.com-

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to President Obama's signature law on health care, it said Monday in an announcement that has nearly as much impact on partisan politics as the final decision has on the law itself.

The challenge in the case, brought by 26 states out of Florida, is based on the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the Patient Accountability and Affordable Care Act, which requires that all Americans purchase health insurance.

The nine-member court will also look at severability, meaning if the mandate falls, could the rest of the law survive since it is primarily built on the revenues collected by forcing people to buy health care.

The court is also folding in an additional case on the tax implications of the law.

The case is one that all sides want heard. But hearing the case this session -- arguments could come in March -- means that a ruling will come in June -- in the heat of the 2012 election cycle.

Some argue that a defeat for Obama would be as beneficial as a victory since it would take away an economic and philosophical argument that Republicans have used to bash the law that will impact roughly 18 percent of the nation's annual gross domestic product. Others say nothing good could come for Obama if his premier legislative victory is declared unconstitutional.

If the mandate is wiped off the map but the law itself isn't, the president would be able to promote aspects that most Americans say they accept, including leaving 26 year olds on their parents insurance and not allowing insurers to reject clients with pre-existing conditions.

"Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, 1 million more young Americans have health insurance, women are getting mammograms and preventive services without paying an extra penny out of their own pocket and insurance companies have to spend more of your premiums on health care instead of advertising and bonuses," White House Communications Director Dan Pfeifer said in a statement.

The 11th Circuit Court, where the case comes from, has ruled in favor of the opponents. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, said the high court brings the challenge one step closer to elimination.

"Given the substantial implementation costs associated with this 2,700-page law--and the unconstitutional mandate that it will impose on all Americans -- we are pleased that the Supreme Court has moved quickly and agreed to hear this very important case," he said.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican presidential candidate who has made repeal and replacement of the law the first plank of his economic plan, tweeted that he is "pleased" the court has agreed to hear the case.

Message from the campaign: In Indiana, we balanced the budget and cut spending, earning us a AAA credit rating as a state.  Those principles of strong fiscal leadership will be at stake in the 2012 election.  Democrat gains were made in 2008 when the state went blue for the first time since 1964.  The tide once again turned in 2010 and 2011 when huge Republican gains were made on the local, state, and federal levels.  This sets the stage for 2012.  Indiana is likely to be a battleground for all races on the federal level, determining the fate of the nation.  You, the voter, can play a key role in that determination by getting involved.  Sign up today to volunteer and make your voice heard!

By Stephen Moore, Wall St. Journal

Indiana is a traditionally Republican state that was colored blue in 2008. The Hoosier State went for Barack Obama by a whisker, 50%-49%, and thus promises to be a key battleground in 2012 as the GOP tries to win back the presidency.

After Tuesday's elections, Republicans have reason to be hopeful about next year. Before the elections, Democrats held a 68 to 48 majority of the mayor's offices. Now, Republicans hold a 61 to 54 majority with 2 Independents. According to the Indiana GOP, the Republicans retained control of city hall in "Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Mishawaka, West Lafayette, Valparaiso, Marion and others, and picked up seats in Columbus, Jeffersonville, Evansville, Logansport, LaPorte and Portage, among others." Two other mayoral races have yet to be decided and may be headed for recounts.

The results come on the heels of big electoral gains for the GOP after last year's midterm elections. Republicans won majorities in the congressional delegation and flipped a U.S. Senate seat from 'D' to 'R.' They won 60 seats in the state house to the Democrats' 40, reversing the Democratic majority of 52 to 48. Republicans also gained four state senate seats.

According to Greg Garrison, a popular radio talk show host in Indiana, the Republican gains on Tuesday are "a tribute to the popularity and competent leadership of Mitch Daniels," the governor. He says Mr. Daniels has balanced the budget, cut spending and increased efficiency of government services. It's a progress agenda that Americans want at all levels of government.

The results on Tuesday also augur well for the GOP in 2012. Republican officials tell me that they are still stunned by Mr. Obama's 2008 win in Indiana, given that George W. Bush won the state by 20 percentage points in 2004 and by 15 points in 2000.

Keep an eye on Indiana for 2012. The GOP almost surely has to win there if the party is to oust Mr. Obama.