Warring House and Senate votes late Friday set up a tense weekend of confrontation — and what the White House hopes are still meaningful negotiations — before markets reopen Monday, one day before the threat of default. 
 
 Stocks slid for the sixth day in a row as anxiety grew on Wall Street, and Washington’s once dry debt debate has grown into a high stakes game of political chess quite unlike anything the city has seen in decades. 
 
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 The House moved first, narrowly approving a Republican-backed debt ceiling bill but only after Speaker John Boehner had to tack right again by adding a provision threatening default next year if Congress doesn’t first approve a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. 
 
 The 218-210 vote was quickly followed by a 59-41 Senate roll call tabling the House bill — at least for the moment. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid set in motion a 1 a.m. Sunday cloture vote on his own debt ceiling and deficit reduction package estimated between $2.2 trillion and $2.4 trillion. 
 
 Reid’s timing was ominous, suggesting the two sides are each trying to back the other into a corner still — without reaching a meaningful deal. But the House bill could yet be resurrected and Republicans predicted it could still be amended as part of a final compromise negotiated by all sides over the weekend. 
 
 Much depends still on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is deeply worried by the prospect of default and has had a running series of conversations with Vice President Joe Biden to try to defuse the crisis. McConnell was frozen in place out of loyalty to Boehner during the House debate but even after, Democrats complained that he was restraining his rank-and-file members from participating in talks. 
 
 “There is a growing sentiment by senators on both sides of the aisle to sit down and reach a reasonable compromise to save our economy from the disaster that awaits us,” said Senate Majority Leader Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) “What these senators on the Republican side are waiting for is a permission slip from Sen. McConnell.” 
 
 That would be a vintage McConnell approach, but aides to the Republican leader said he is fully prepared to begin talks with Reid and others, as long as President Barack Obama is also represented at the table. 
 
 There’s been bad blood between McConnell and Reid after a falling out last weekend over debt talks also involving Boehner. But McConnell’s office expressed confidence that a deal could yet be reached with the White House represented. ||||| Taking square aim at the White House, Republicans prepared to bring to a House vote Thursday a two-step $2.5 trillion debt ceiling bill that will avert default next week but threatens more conflict — and renewed instability — in six months. 
 
 Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell remain in conversation over how to defuse the building confrontation before the threat of default next week. But with stocks falling again Wednesday, the fight between Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama has become so personal that each side says the other needs to find some way to save face before reaching a deal. 
 
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 Fifty-three senators, 51 Democrats and two independents, signed a letter to Boehner on Wednesday vowing to oppose the House bill. But the speaker is unapologetic about his intentions to use the default crisis to try to jam the Senate. And at a GOP conference Wednesday morning, he enlisted conservatives to be his “army” after he had stood “toe to toe” with the president and put his “neck on the line” for them. 
 
 “There are only three possible outcomes in this battle: President Obama gets his blank check; America defaults; or we call the president’s bluff by coming together and passing a bill that cuts spending and can pass in the United States Senate,” Boehner told the rank and file, according to aides to the speaker. “There is no other option.” 
 
 Republicans will hold another conference Thursday morning at which a final decision can be made about moving ahead. But after retooling the bill and getting a higher savings score from the Congressional Budget Office late Wednesday, there was growing confidence that Boehner will move ahead. 
 
 As now written, the measure allows for two adjustments in Treasury’s borrowing authority, each contingent on achieving at least matching savings. 
 
 The first — a $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling — is paired with a set of 10-year statutory spending caps intended to wring savings out of future appropriations bills to fund government operations. 
 
 CBO had stunned Republicans late Tuesday when it estimated that the 10-year deficit reduction would be only $850 billion — well short of Boehner’s $1 trillion target. But after some refinements Wednesday, the bill won a higher CBO score of $917 billion, just enough to cover the full $900 billion. 
 
 The changes were largely technical and driven more by CBO scoring methods than any real additional cuts beyond those Boehner had already proposed at the beginning of this week. 
 
 Indeed, in trying to be tougher on spending, the leadership fell into a trap by imposing statutory outlay caps for appropriations bills in 2012 and 2013. It is always a bit of a gamble to estimate the rate at which appropriations — budget dollars in the bank, so to speak — will be drawn down by agencies and go out the door in the form of direct outlays. But in this case, the GOP set its caps so high that it exceeded what CBO predicted the spending rate would have been with no such restrictions.
– Harry Reid and John Boehner each made progress in their quest for votes yesterday—but that actually drove them further away from a compromise. House Republicans and Senate Democrats “seemed to operate in alternate realities,” the New York Times observes, with each sure the other would eventually cave and accept their bill. If there’s hope for a compromise, it might come from Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell, who according to Politico are in talks on how to end the showdown. To build support for his bill, Boehner tweaked it to raise its disappointing CBO score to $917 billion in savings—mostly through technical changes that took CBO accounting practices into account. But 53 Senators, including two independents, signed a letter saying they wouldn’t pass the House bill. The standoff spooked investors and sent stocks plummeting—the Dow fell 199 points, with the Nasdaq and S&P down 75 and 27, respectively, according to MarketWatch. The Treasury is preparing for the worst, too; by the end of the week, it says it will lay out who will and won’t get paid if a deal isn’t reached.