Senate GOP leader Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tore into President Obama for more than 15 minutes on the Senate floor today.

Reacting to the president's criticism of Congress yesterday, he said Obama had the "gall" to call for congressional leadership "after he has displayed an astounding lack of leadership."

And then said: "I think the president has diminished that office and himself by giving the kind of campaign speeches that he gave yesterday."

He added that the president shouldn't be going to two fundraisers tonight -- he should be calling congressional leadership for meetings.

A day after the President chided Congress for not stepping up its working pace to hammer out a deficit deal, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced on the Senate floor that the Fourth of July recess would be cancelled.

The Senate will come into session the afternoon of July 5 and all day Wednesday July 6.

The rest of the week is still to be determined, Democratic aides said.

Items that could be on the agenda starting Tuesday: the McCain-Kerry Libya resolution authorizing a limited one-year mission for U.S. forces, plus some jobs packages.  Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad is also ready to unveil a long-awaited Democratic budget plan.

At a caucus meeting Wednesday night, Democrats discussed the possibility of cancelling recess. Several senators left the meeting visibly grumbling at the prospect of coming back to work to make what is largely a political statement. A group of mostly freshman Republican senators also held a press conference Wednesday to make clear they are jumping at the chance to cancel recess to get to work.

"It is really important that we do this," Reid said on the floor Thursday morning. "That moment is too important, the obstacle is too steep and the time too short to waste even a moment. I hope my Republican colleagues will put politics aside and help Democrats fulfill Congress's responsibility to the American people."

The battle over the deficit has now spilled out in a big way on Capitol Hill after several weeks of relatively quiet bipartisan negotiations led by Vice President Joe Biden. Now both sides are digging in on their respective positions. Democrats are hammering the message that Republicans would rather protect the wealthy from more taxes while Republicans say Democrats are trying to hike takes and spend more.

In the latest round of maneuvering, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor to invite President Obama to Capitol Hill today to meet with Senate Republicans.

"That way he can hear directly from Republicans why what he's proposing won't pass," McConnell said. "And we can start talking about what's actually possible. The President says he wants us to get working. I can't think of a better way than to have him come over and hear directly from our conference about the legislative realities in the Congress right now."

The President is expected to leave for Philadelphia later this afternoon.

The Senate has just gone into session -- and it took Majority Leader Harry Reid two minutes to begin attacking the Paul Ryan Medicare plan, as well as where the Republican Party stands on the proposal.

Without naming GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, Reid said "one prominent candidate" has "spun himself into circles" to explain his position on the plan.

Reid plans to hold a vote on the Ryan budget later this week (day TBD) -- which he argued will "kill Medicare." Reid is calling the vote to force Senate Republicans to take a position on the Medicare proposal.

To counter the Democrats, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to call a vote on President Obama's FY2012 budget to force Democrats (especially those up for re-election in 2012) to take a stand on a budget that many said didn't go far enough in spending cuts and deficit reduction.

Both votes are purely political with no chance of passage. 

A key Republican lawmaker on national security issues warned Tuesday that it would be a "huge mistake and a catastrophic blunder" to interpret the killing of Osama bin Laden as an end to the need for U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a press conference that -- despite the celebrations over the al Qaeda leader's death -- the Obama administration should "go slow when it goes to troop withdrawals" in Afghanistan.

Graham said he is confident that the president will not be prompted to accelerate troop withdrawals in July because "he understands the signal it will send." But, he added, he intends to ask CIA chief Leon Panetta whether the successful operation to eliminate bin Laden will ultimately be used by the administration as an "excuse" for a faster drawdown.

Panetta will brief members of Congress this afternoon in closed-door briefings on both sides of the Capitol.

Atop lawmakers' lists of questions for Panetta and other administration officials with knowledge of the U.S. raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan will be how the operation could affect already tense relations between the two nations. The Pakistani government has stated concerns about the unilateral nature of the raid on its soil in Abbottabad.

"You cannot trust them and you cannot abandon them," Graham said of Pakistan.

The South Carolina senator threw some cold water on one point that some in his party are eager to highlight: that specific enhanced interrogation techniques may have delivered information that led U.S. intelligence authorities to bin Laden's location.

While criticizing the Obama administration's ban on CIA operatives' use of such tactics, he called the claim that waterboarding was essential to bin Laden's capture "a misstatement."

"I do not believe this is a time to celebrate waterboarding," Graham said. "I believe this is a time to celebrate hard work."