Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, Ky) brokered a deal that is likely to be approved by the Senate early Tuesday before being put to a vote in the House later in the day. The WSJ writes:
By waiting until the last minute, and reaching a deal on a much smaller scale than either side once envisioned, Washington also deferred many of its thorniest questions for perhaps as little as a few weeks. In late February of early March, the Treasury Department will run out of extraordinary measures to deal with the government’s borrowing limit — which it reached on Monday — and Congress would need to approve an increase. The delay in the spending cuts will run out about the same time. In effect, Congress has delayed the fiscal cliff by erecting a new and potentially more dangerous one.
Read more at The Fiscal Cliff – WSJ.com.