As long as the patient winds up pretty much mortally wounded we’ll have our compromise.

The endgame of the deficit fight is going to be so brutal and so predictable I can barely bring myself to watch it. Republicans will say “we won’t raise the debt limit” even though they’ve privately assured Wall Street and the President they will. Democrats will say “this is irresponsible” even though they’ll attach something just as irresponsible to what ultimately passes. And the compromise reform will end up as something the White House wanted anyway.

Reid said, “There will be an opportunity in the Senate to vote on the Ryan budget to see if Republican senators like the Ryan budget as much as the House did.”

With just hours to go until a shutdown, it’s worth noting that there is a slight disconnect within the Republican caucus. As the truth leaks out that Planned Parenthood – Planned Parenthood! – is at the heart of the negotiations, some Republicans are experiencing discomfort.

Reid specifically mentioned two ideological points that were holding up the debate, saying that Republicans on the House side “have drawn a line in the sand.”

The two policy pieces? Abortion, and the environment.

We know what Republicans want out of a continuing resolution – deep cuts and policy changes that would block just about the entire Obama agenda of the first two years. Now we know precisely what Democrats want, at least in the short term. Harry Reid will introduce a “clean” continuing resolution next week that will freeze government funding at 2010 levels for 30 days. There’s this conceit in calling reductions from Obama’s 2011 budget request “cuts,” but that budget never got adopted. So while Reid calls this $41 billion in cuts, it’s really just a freeze at the current levels.

Senators Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer jumped all over comments today by a House Republican that essentially threatened a government shutdown over the continuing resolution on the Fiscal Year 2011 budget. They asked House leadership to clarify whether they agree that a government shutdown is possible in the next three weeks, when the current continuing resolution expires.

The obvious goal here is to paint the GOP as extreme and rigid, and the Democrats as willing to compromise for the sake of the nation. The phrase “let’s use a meat axe instead of a scalpel” came up a lot. Only once did Reid manage to mention that the goal should be creating jobs at this point, not a monomaniacal focus on the deficit.

At a Peter Peterson deficit fest last spring President Clinton said: “I wanted to cut Social Security, but they wouldn’t let me.” In 10 years, maybe President Obama will be able to say the same thing.

Harry Reid spoke about votes expected in the remainder of the lame duck session. He cited START, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the DREAM Act, the 9-11 health care bill and possibly votes on judicial nominations if an agreement wasn’t reached to move them in a block. As for when, he simply committed to votes on those issues “before this Congress ends,” not before Christmas.

The lame duck session, which in its first week has lived up to its name, just got a bit more interesting.