welcome back to msnbc saturday. to politics now. it is coming down to the wire on the debt ceiling deadline. president obama will restart negotiations this morning at the white house. speaker john boehner walked out lst night. all the talk about responsibility, all the talk about the next generation, all the talk about making sacrifices, that when it comes to actually doing something difficult, folks walk away. they refuse to get serious about cutting spending and making the tough choices or facing our country on entitlement reform. that s the bomb line. john harwood is cnbc s chief washington correspondent and a political writer for the new york times.
virginia usually gets the call, or jim webb to come in and just actually have a ceremonial session, so they don t adjourn. that means the president cannot do a recess appointment. republicans have been worried that he might choose elizabeth warren to fill a controversial new position that comes out of the whole banking reform, a consumer financial protection agency. they don t want to see that happen, so they put up this roadblock. democrats said they didn t have any indication that the president was going to do that, so they went along. liberals have been urging the president to put her on this post, because she can t get through confirmation, but republicans found a way to shut that down. it s, again, about the tensions between the legislative branch, which gets to approve these appointments, and the executive branch that wants to pick its own team. the age-old battle there on capitol hill. reporter: exactly. all right, kelly, thank you. reporter: have a good weekend. you t
san francisco and marin county. the next day, president roosevelt declared the bridge open for automobiles. and speaking of, despite the high price at the pump, aaa says more americans actually do plan on traveling this holiday weekend. here in kansas city, you can see from our live pictures, they are already on the go, and many are asking the same question, what s the deal with gas prices? sharon epperson is cnbc s senior energy correspondent. sharon, good morning. reporter: the summer driving season is upon us, and finally, we are seeing some relief at the pump. we are seeing prices right now that are down about 10 cents from where we were a week ago. in fact, we re near a five-week low for gasoline prices at the pump as we go into this holiday weekend, but how long is it going to last? we ve been talking to a number of expert abs about this, and m say it s unusual, but we re likely to see gasoline prices continue to fall through this weekend into early june at least, perhaps as
will cut $38 billion in federal spending. that announcement prevented a government shutdown just hours before it was set to begin. actually about one hour. john harwood is cnbc s chief washington correspondent. late night, huh? crazy, alex. absolutely crazy. let s talk about speaker boehner and the president. they were vague about the details of the agreement. what about clarity this morning? do you see anything more in terms of what the final deal is going to look like? fundamentally, alex, you have the spending cut number increase by a few billion dollars to $38.5 billion and the democrats succeeding in moving those riders on planned parenthood, on funding the obama health care law, to separate up or down votes in the senate. and that ultimately is what got this deal done. in the end, it was a deal that was pretty favorable to republicans and i think you ve got to say that first of all everybody wins by avoiding losing.
spending cut in u.s. history. both sides claiming investigatory, republicans for the sheer volume of the cuts, the white house and democrats for outlasting gop initiatives that would have blocked certain environmental regulations and changed a federal program that provides family planning services. a budget that this morning even if barely is still breathing. and as lawmakers take a deep breath now, after the debate, the specifics of the cuts still aren t clear. we should get a bit more information about that as we get a closer look at the bill in the next couple of days. alex? jay gray, thank you for that. we ll try to get more information on all this because we have new perspective this morning on all of the different angles from the budget fight. nbc s luke russert covers capitol hill, john harbaugh is the cnbc chief washington correspondent and good morning to you. thank you for joining me for this particular round of things. good morning. john, i m going to start with you he