The Senate approved a three-month suspension of the debt limit on Thursday, sending it to the White House for President Barack Obama’s likely signature.

The upper chamber voted 64 to 34 to add its approval to a plan conceived by House Republicans, which would push the deadline at which the government runs out of authority to borrow money to finance its obligations until May 18. The government would have otherwise run out of money within a matter of weeks.

In exchange for the extension of borrowing authority, both the House and Senate must now draft and approve separate budget resolutions by mid-April. The legislation approved Thursday by the Senate and last week by the House would place lawmakers’ pay into escrow if they were to fail to pass a budget.

The Obama administration has indicated that while the president would have preferred a longer-term extension of the debt ceiling, it did not oppose the short-term extension. Obama is expected to sign the legislation into law.

Attention will now turn to the normal budgeting process that typically dominates the first few months of the calendar year in Congress. Republicans’ gambit in offering this proposal was to highlight how Senate Democrats had failed to pass a formal budget resolution in the last four years. (Democrats argue they were working off of a de-facto budget stipulated by various spending cut agreements passed by Congress.)

Leaders of both chambers have suggested they’ll push ahead with ambitious, and markedly different, budgets.

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, will lead the GOP’s efforts; he’s vowed to produce a budget that would balance the budget in the next 10 years without raising any new taxes.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have said they plan to seek additional revenues from taxes in the budget they will produce. Washington Sen. Patty Murray, D, the chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee, will lead that effort.

Slideshow: Obama's first term

Robin Buckson / AP

The president's first four years at the White House in pictures.

Launch slideshow

Just 11 weeks removed from a sweeping re-election victory, President Barack Obama has hit the ground running with an ambitious second-term agenda that includes tackling the mounting national debt, immigration and gun control.

But the window in which the president has any hopes of meeting his aggressive goals has already begun to close.

Confronting the fading effectiveness of a second-term presidency, dogged opposition from Republicans in Congress and unexpected hurdles that will inevitably arise over the next four years, Obama must act with a sense of urgency on his plans, particularly amid the fiscal cliff negotiations.

“Second-term presidents generally get eight months or so ... where there's a honeymoon to push an agenda,” said James Thurber, the director of Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. “He doesn't even have a month.”

Newly armed with “Organizing for Action” – the remnants of the president’s campaign structure, converted to a nonprofit for advocacy purposes – Obama has suggested he will indeed act quickly on his top priorities.

But the next few months might well test the limits of the political capital that the president won in November, which saw Obama score a decisive victory over Republican opponent Mitt Romney and Democrats add seats in the House and the Senate.

If this past December’s lame duck Congress – in which Obama won higher tax rates for the wealthy, but only after a bitter fight with Republicans – offers any lessons, it’s that the GOP is equally committed to pursuing its own priorities, making compromise just as elusive as before.

The fiscal cliff fight will extend into this spring, when the government hits a series of major deadlines to keep the government funded and prevent a default on the national debt. That bare-knuckled fight could make or break Obama’s hopes of accomplishing much else on his agenda.

“I don't believe that he can wait until the last minute to deal with the debt ceiling and sequestration,” said Martin Frost, a former Democratic congressman from Texas. “That's got to be worked out during February.”

That fight would threaten to consume much of the political oxygen in Washington in any normal year. And Obama’s ability to pivot toward his other major priorities, gun violence and immigration, may well hinge upon how quickly and cleanly he can dispense with this spring’s spending fight.

History suggests that many presidents cannot hope to accomplish much in the last two years of their term, when the jockeying for the next presidential campaign begins. And with midterm elections looming in 2014, lawmakers will inevitably turn at some point from governing to politicking.

"There's kind of an arc of achievement in presidential administrations. Usually the first few months of a new administration is where most of the accomplishment takes place," said Ross Baker, a presidential historian at Rutgers University. "It's hard to imagine getting another piece of legislation of the magnitude of the Affordable Care Act in the second term."

And Obama’s hopes of significant reforms to immigration and gun laws might well depend upon how well (or how poorly) the spending fight with Congress proceeds.

The president last week laid out a series of measures intended to curb gun violence, most significantly proposals to limit the size of ammunition magazines, ban assault weapons and require universal background checks on firearm purchases. That plan won little praise from Republicans, and Obama might have to lean upon any reservoir of goodwill he has left after the spending fight to reach his goals.

Obama is practically obligated to attempt immigration reform after soothing the Latino community during last year’s election about his inability to follow through with a pledge to accomplish immigration reform in his first term. If re-elected, Obama told Hispanic voters, he would make immigration reform a priority in this second term.

Both proposals could engender significant Republican resistance, a phenomenon familiar to any observers of Obama’s first four years in office.

Another significant – and unpredictable – variable that could ruin even the best-laid plans involves the unknown crises that will inevitably arise during Obama’s second term.

A foreign policy crisis could always erupt and consume the president’s attention. Uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Syria, for instance, proved to major developments during Obama’s first four years in office.

If anything, the president’s first term offered a cautionary tale of how difficult it can be to navigate the obstacles to success that can arise.

The president nearly saw his signature health reform law go down to defeat after the advent of the Tea Party movement, for instance.

And external events – a near-meltdown of the economy, mass shootings, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and other crises – consumed as much of the president’s first term as anything else.

Just as foreign policy could prove to be a diversion from policy making, it’s one of the few policy areas where a lame-duck president can leave a legacy.

For instance, Bill Clinton, in the waning days of his presidency, concentrated on achieving an elusive peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians.

“He's got a whole range of things on his plate right now,” Frost said of Obama, “it just really depends on how he prioritizes things.”

If the U.S. government ends up careening off the "fiscal cliff," Republicans in Congress stand to shoulder most of the blame, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

A majority of Americans said in a new, post-election poll that they do not expect President Barack Obama and members of Congress to reach an agreement to avoid the effects of the fiscal cliff, the combination of automatic spending cuts and tax hikes set to take effect at the beginning of the year.

Fifty-three percent of Americans said Republicans in Congress would be more to blame in that instance, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in the days following the election. Twenty-nine percent said that Obama would be more to blame, while 10 percent said both the president and Republicans would share blame.

Those kinds of numbers help set the political landscape heading into the impending fight to resolve the long-running fiscal standoff, which features an emboldened Obama fresh off a re-election victory and a Republican Party looking to regain its footing in Washington after losing seats in the House and Senate in addition to Mitt Romney's White House loss.

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Lawmakers on Capitol Hill returned to work on Tuesday to begin sorting out these issues and beginning to work on some internal affairs, including choosing their own leadership teams for the next two years.

But just a few weeks separate the U.S. from the onset of the fiscal cliff, as the 2001 Bush tax cuts and the 2010 payroll tax cut are set to expire at the end of this calendar year. On top of that, the automatic spending cuts -- which fall heavily on the defense budget -- will also take place beginning in January unless Congress acts first.

Win Mcnamee / Getty Images

Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, speaks at a press conference as Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., and Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., listen on Capitol Hill Sept. 20, 2012 in Washington, DC.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans said in the Pew poll that they would expect the impact of the fiscal cliff to be major, and 70 percent said they expect the fallout from the fiscal cliff to be mostly negative.

The president hosted labor leaders at the White House on Tuesday morning in anticipation of the upcoming negotiations, and Obama will host business leaders on Wednesday. Leaders in Congress from both parties head to the White House for talks on Friday.

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Both Obama and Republicans in Congress have begun laying out parameters for those negotiations, and White House press secretary Jay Carney reiterated on Tuesday afternoon that the president would not sign any law extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Obama has instead called on Congress to extend all tax rates except for those in the top income bracket.

(Republicans have called for broader talks that link an overhaul in the tax code to entitlement program reforms.)

The Pew poll was conducted Nov. 8-11 and has a 3.7 percent margin of error.

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, finishes a prepared statement to reporters about the elections and the unfinished business of Congress, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, emerged in the aftermath of Tuesday’s presidential election to strike a conciliatory note, offering to work with President Barack Obama on a grand bargain to avert the impact of the coming fiscal cliff.

The top House Republican argued for new negotiations with Democrats and the newly re-elected Obama administration on an overarching fiscal deal linking together reforms to entitlements and the tax code.

Boehner said that Republicans would be “willing to accept new revenue, under the right conditions,” though those very conditions could be as beguiling as ever.

The speaker offered no clue as to whether Republicans would relent from their insistence (made during fiscal negotiations last year) that any sort of tax reform package not constitute anything even remotely resembling a tax hike.

Obama has spoken favorably about tax reform – including during his victory speech last night in Chicago – but in such a way that wealthier Americans would face the increased tax burden.

Resolving that very open question could prove the key to resolving – or exacerbating – the fiscal impasse that has plagued Washington for the better part of the last two years.

Romney never overcame bailout opposition

“Shoring up entitlements and reforming the tax code – closing special interest loopholes and deductions, and moving to a fairer, simpler system – will bring jobs home and result in a stronger, healthier economy,” Boehner said during a Wednesday afternoon statement on Capitol Hill.

By the same token, the speaker suggested that a deal was untenable during the coming lame-duck Congress, calling for a “down payment” on fiscal reform that would give both parties ample space to negotiate in early 2013.

Full national election results

Boehner’s words reflected the immediacy of the challenge before lawmakers in the coming weeks if they are to successfully avoid the “fiscal cliff,” the nickname for the automatic tax hikes and spending cuts set to spring into place at the beginning of next year.

Economists have warned that this combination, the byproduct of legislative gridlock on issues of tax and spending during the last two years, would imperil the economic recovery in the U.S.

The election on Tuesday maintained Republican control of the House, Democratic control of the Senate and, Obama’s control of the White House – the same basic makeup of government that produced gridlock on fiscal issues for the past two years.

The White House said Wednesday that Obama, just hours after securing re-election, phoned leaders of both parties in the House and the Senate. During those call, the president “reiterated his commitment to finding bipartisan solutions to: reduce our deficit in a balanced way, cut taxes for middle class families and small businesses and create jobs.”

But as Boehner called for more time to address the looming fiscal crisis, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suggested he was disinclined to extend the timeline for reaching a deal.

“I’m not for kicking the can down the road. I think we’ve done that far too much,” he said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. “Waiting for a month, six weeks, six months – that’s not going to solve the problem. We know what needs to be done, so I think we should just roll up our sleeves and get it done.”

First Thoughts: Obama's demographic edge

The dueling statements, though, set the parameters for fiscal talks that are set to dominate political discourse in the coming months.

The fight plays out amid election results that, as Vice President Joe Biden asserted on Wednesday, provided the administration with a “clear sort of mandate about people coming much closer to our view about how to deal with tax policy.”

Almost two-thirds of voters, according to national exit polls, said “no” when asked whether taxes should be raised to help cut the budget deficit. But 47 percent of voters, a plurality, said that taxes should increase only on those earning more than $250,000 – a centerpiece of Obama’s re-election campaign on which Obama stumped this fall.

Barring any action by Congress, tax rates would spring upward for all income brackets as the 2001 Bush-era tax cuts, which were extended for two years in 2009, expired.

The spending “sequester,” established by Congress during the 2011 debt ceiling deal as an incentive for lawmakers to reach a compromise budgetary solution, is also set to take effect at the beginning of next year absent an agreement by Congress. Republicans have grown especially worrisome about the sequester because of the heavy cuts it would make to the defense budget.

As the business of legislating resumes, a key actor in the process could be Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the former Republican vice presidential nominee who lost Tuesday as Mitt Romney’s running mate. Ryan simultaneously won re-election to Congress, and said Wednesday in a statement that he intends to resume his post as chairman of the House Budget Committee.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- Congressman Paul Ryan said the national debt surpassing $16 trillion Tuesday is a “downer” and argued it’s President Obama’s “worst” broken promise to the country only further underlining why voters should choose a new path this November.

“This is a serious threat to our economy,” Ryan told the crowd roughly an hour after the Treasury Department announced that the national debt surpassed $16 trillion for the first time in American history. “Of all the broken promises from President Obama, this is probably the worst one because this debt is threatening jobs today, it is threating prosperity today and it is guaranteeing that our children and grandchildren get a diminished future.”

Speaking in the same venue President Obama visited earlier in the summer, the Wisconsin congressman took a jab at the Democrats who kick off their convention in Charlotte, N.C., today: “We had a debt clock at the convention last week. I don’t see the debt clock at the convention this week.”

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad piled on as well.

“And just this week when the Democrats are about to gather for their convention, to promise four more years of the same, the united states national debt has hit a record high of 16 trillion dollars. No coincidence it's the same day as their convention begins,” Branstad told the nearly 900-person crowd.

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Standing in front of two large “are you better off” signs – with the Obama ‘O’ artwork in them – Ryan blamed the incumbent president for not having “leadership on this issue” and vowed that a Romney administration would turn the country around.

The Obama re-election campaign disagrees. 

“Congressman Ryan’s the last person to lecture on the debt and here’s why: he was a rubber stamp in Congress for the policies that turned surpluses into deficits, putting two wars on the credit card, voting for a prescription drug benefit without paying for it, and fighting for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans when they weren’t asking for them,” Danny Kanner, Obama campaign spokesman, wrote in a statement.

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Earlier in the day while stumping in the battleground state of Ohio, Ryan continued to tie parallels to the 2012 election to the 1980 election.

“If we fired Jimmy Carter, then why would we re-hire Barack Obama now?” the GOP VP nominee said. “President Obama can tell you a lot, and he’s good at doing that, but he cannot tell you that you’re better off. After four years of getting the runaround what America needs is a turnaround, and the man for that job is Mitt Romney.”

Ryan will continue campaigning in the Hawkeye State Wednesday before heading out West for a big fundraising push.

Signs of another debt ceiling fight emerged Wednesday as President Obama hosted Congressional leaders at the White House. Press Secretary Jay Carney said the president warned against another last-minute deal to raise the debt limit, even as House Speaker John Boehner insisted this week on spending cuts equal to or higher than the amount the debt ceiling is raised. 

By msnbc.com's Tom Curry

SEATTLE -- At a press conference here Wednesday, the new co-chair of the Special Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, four-term Democratic Sen. Patty Murray urged the public and news media to "give us a little time and space and not try to pigeonhole each and every one of us" into ideological categories. 

"There's a lot of disagreement in this country about what exactly we need to get done. There will be a lot of people who will try to divide us" before the members have even started their work, she said. Her job, she said, was "to bridge that divide."

She said she could do her job as committee co-chair as well as all her other jobs. Most noteworthy of those: chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee -- the fundraising & candidate recruiting arm of her party. "Multitasking is something every mom knows how to do," she said in response to a reporter's question.

Echoing President Obama, she said she'd pursue "a balanced approach" which implied both changes in entitlement programs and increases in tax revenues but she didn't even hint at any specific measures she might favor.

True to her traditional concern for those depending on entitlement programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, she made a point of saying she'd keep in mind "those who have been hurt the most" in the financial crisis and recession, "working families and our seniors. They're feeling especially vulnerable today."

And as she has before she said, "everyone in this country understands we have a fiscal deficit; they also understand we have a jobs deficit."

Murray passed when asked for her assessment of the Republican members of the committee.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner have made their selections to the so-called Super Committee which will be tasked with finding over $1 trillion more in savings in exchange for another raise in the nation's debt ceiling.  The committee was a key part of the budget deal struck by Congress and the president last week.

McConnell named Sens. Jon Kyl (AZ), Pat Toomey (PA) and Rob Portman (OH) while Boehner tapped Reps. Jeb Hensnarling (TX), Dave Camp (MI) and Fred Upton (MI).

They join three Democratic Senators announced yesterday by Majority Leader Harry Reid:  John Kerry (MA), Patty Murray (WA) and Max Baucus (MT).  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will name the final three members of the committee.

Appearing on MSNBC this morning prior to the GOP announcements, former Sen. Alan Simpson, who co-chaired the commission on fiscal responsibility formed by President Obama last year, voiced concern over the direction of the appointments.  Watch:

By Kristen Welker
     NBC News

It was far from a victory lap.  Speaking from the Rose Garden Tuesday, President Obama called the plan to raise the debt ceiling, “an important first step to ensuring that as a nation we live within our means.”  Mr. Obama then proceeded to lash out at Congress saying, “it shouldn’t take the risk of default – the risk of economic catastrophe –  to get folks in this town to work together and do their jobs.” 

The duality of the President’s remarks capped off a long process that has been rife with heated debate and partisan wrangling. After the speech, Mr. Obama signed the compromise plan with just hours to spare before the nation would have defaulted on its loans.

The President also seemed to want to turn the page on the debt limit debate by focusing on the future.  He reiterated his call for Congress to take some immediate steps which he says would create jobs including: extending tax cuts for middle-class families, passing patent reform, and passing a set of trade deals.  The familiar remarks were an indication that the President is trying to steer the conversation back to jobs and the economy and away from the ugly debate that has dominated the nation’s Capital for the past several months. 

But, it’s not clear if the nation is ready to move on.  According to a recent Washington Post, Pew Research Center poll, almost three quarters of Americans had a negative word to describe how they viewed the budget negotiations.  The top words included, “ridiculous, disgusting and stupid.”

Acknowledging that public frustration, the President reiterated another familiar sentiment: “Voters may have chosen divided government, but they sure didn’t vote for dysfunctional government.” When White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, was asked if the President felt that he bore some of the responsibility for the “dysfunction,” Carney would only say, ”I think that this President from very early on in this process made abundantly clear his willingness to compromise, his willingness to accept the fact that he would not in this environment, in this divided government, get everything that he wanted.” 

The compromise plan will increase the nation’s $14.3 trillion borrowing limit through 2012 and will be matched with about $1 trillion dollars in deficit reductions.  Under the second phase of the plan, a bipartisan, bicameral “Super-Committee” will be charged with identifying about $1.5 trillion dollars more in deficit reductions (through entitlement and tax reform).  If the committee does not act by Thanksgiving, mandatory across the board cuts go into effect to defense and discretionary spending.  Many Democrats are upset because they say the plan will unfairly target the poor and the middle class, and some Republicans argue the cuts don’t go deep enough. 

In essence, few were celebrating the passage of the bill, but everyone was breathing a sigh of relief having averted what many economists warned would be a global financial crisis if the debt ceiling were not raised.  “We’ve got to do everything in our power to grow this economy and put American back to work” Mr. Obama warned.  He and everyone else in D.C. hopes the nation can now, finally, move forward.  

By msnbc.com's Tom Curry:  The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office gave its assessment Monday of the Budget Control Act agreed to Sunday by President Obama and congressional leaders. The CBO estimates that if the deal is enacted, it would reduce cumulative deficits by at least $2.1 trillion over the period from 2012 to 2021.

The CBO also said the agreement would allow Obama to increase the limit on government borrowing, in stages, by between $2.1 trillion and $2.4 trillion.

So according to the CBO analysis, the deal does not quite meet House Speaker Boehner’s test of having deficit reductions that are greater than the debt limit increase. But in talking points distributed Sunday night Boehner emphasized that in short term the agreement “would cut & cap discretionary spending immediately, saving $917B (billion) over 10 years (certified by CBO) & raise the debt ceiling by less – $900B – to approximately February.”

And matching ten-year deficit reductions with this particular debt limit increase doesn’t address an important unknown: It’s not possible to predict exactly when Obama or his successor, if he’s not re-elected, would need to ask Congress to once again increase the debt limit.

Between 2007 and 2010, the debt limit was increased six times, from $8.9 trillion to $14.3 trillion.

Even before the full impact of the recession hit the federal budget, the debt limit had to be increased in September of 2007 and again in July of 2008.

Future debt limit increases will depend on several factors, including interest rates (which determine how much it will cost the government to service its debt), the cost of overseas military operations, and whether the economy grows faster than the anemic 0.4 percent rate at which it grew in the first quarter of the year.

By NBC's Luke Russert and msnbc.com's Vaughn Ververs:  House Speaker John Boehner literally and figuratively embraced his top deputy, putting his arm around Minority Leader Eric Cantor and telling reporters that the two Republican leaders remain together, fighting in the same “foxhole.”

Cantor has been the target of Democratic criticism in the wake of the tense budget negotiations on Wednesday and there have been rumblings about a split between himself and the speaker.  “Let me just say, we have been in this fight together,” Boehner said.  “And any suggestion that the role Eric has played in this meeting has been anything less than helpful is just wrong.  Listen, we’re in the foxhole and I’m going to tell you this is not easy.  What we are trying to do here is solve a problem that has eluded Washington for decades.  I’m glad Eric is there and those who have other opinions can keep them to themselves.”

Cantor was asked about comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said Cantor should not be at the bargaining table for the talks aimed at raising the debt ceiling.  “The speaker and I have consistently been on the same page,” Cantor said, adding, “Just as he laid out in terms of the principles that we are operating under that our conference is fully behind. That we are not going to raise the debt ceiling if we don't have cuts in excess of that amount. That we don't want to raise taxes and that we want to structurally change the system so we stop this from happening again.”