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'Grand Bargain' Budget Deal Elusive; Obama To Hold News Conference

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and President Obama at the White House on Sunday.
Mandel Ngan
/
AFP/Getty Images
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and President Obama at the White House on Sunday.

There will surely be several more "decisive moments" in the seemingly never-ending negotiations between the White House, President Obama's fellow Democrats and Republican leaders over raising the federal debt limit, cutting federal budget deficits and generally putting the nation's fiscal books in order.

The weekend certainly brought its share.

As NPR's Ari Shapiro reported today onMorning Edition, those talks took a critical turn Saturday when House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the deal that he and the president had hoped to strike to cut $4 trillion from projected federal deficits over the next decade couldn't pass the House because Obama and his fellow Democrats were asking for too much in the way of taxes.

The White House responded that it was seeking a "balanced approach" to debt and deficit reduction.

Sunday, the president met with Boehner and other leaders at the White House to see if some life could be pumped back into that "grand bargain." But as Ari reports, if there was any progress made during that meeting "neither side said so publicly."

So now, there will be meetings every day — at least between staffers. They're pushing to reach some sort of agreement by July 22 — the day the White House says a deal needs to be reached if the legislation is going to be written and passed by Congress before Aug. 2, when the government will run out of ways to keep borrowing and could technically default on its debts.

The president will be holding a news conference to talk about all this at 11 a.m. ET today. We'll live-blog it.

Meanwhile, check out some of this morning's headlines about where things stand:

-- The Wall Street Journal:" Deficit Negotiators Hit Reset."

--The Washington Post: "Debt Reduction Talks In Limbo As Clock Ticks Toward Aug. 2 Deadline."

-- The Hill: "Obama, Lawmakers Fail To Reach Breakthrough At White House."

-- The Financial Times: "Obama Applies Pressure On Republicans."

-- The Daily Caller:"Obama Seeks 2012 Victory Via Debt Talks."

-- The Huffington Post:"Obama Tries To Re-Sell Republicans On A Grand Debt Ceiling Deal."

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Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.