As promised, a group of senior Republican senators influential on defense policy unveiled a bill Thursday to divert a portion of the $1.2 trillion in mandatory cuts set to take effect in January 2013.

"I believe the cuts are a threat to national security," said lead bill sponsor John McCain of Arizona, top Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

The "Down Payment to Protect National Security Act," whose ultimate goal is to unwind the full reduction, achieves $127 billion in savings over 10 years, to cover $110 billion in scheduled cuts to defense and certain domestic programs in 2013 alone, by continuing a freeze on federal government worker pay as well as by slicing the workforce by 5 percent through attrition.

The $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts, falling equally on defense and domestic budgets, came about as part of a bipartisan compromise to raise the nation's debt ceiling.  The failure of the deficit reduction super committee triggered the cuts, called a "sequestration." 

"You don't eat a steak in one bite. You try to do it in bite size pieces," said the Senate's No. 2 Republican, Jon Kyl of Arizona, who worked with McCain and four other GOP senators on the plan, which would buy time for lawmakers to find the remaining offsets, an Olympic-caliber task which members have, to date, failed.

The measure also contains a national emergency and national security waiver. (read more)

Like something from the Twilight Zone, Fox News has learned exclusively that Super Committee Republicans are meeting Tuesday night on Capitol Hill.

Despite an abject failure last week, Fox has learned that all six Republican members of the Super Committee have returned to their old haunt, 202A Cannon, to reassess where they stand and where they go from here.

A source tells Fox News that one thing they are discussing are ways to mitigate the defense sequester.

"We're just trying to figure out the way forward," said another source familiar with the meeting.

Another added, "They wanted to get the band back together."

But others have cautioned against making too much of it, suggesting the meeting is more of a "thank you" than anything else.

Now that the Super Committee has failed, the blame game begins, and politicians from both sides of the aisle took to the opinion pages on Tuesday to point fingers amid growing frustration with Washington.

"I did everything possible," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in USA Today of his efforts to encourage the deficit-reduction committee to produce an economic plan. "The so-called Super Committee was unable to reach agreement because President Obama and Washington Democrats insisted on dramatic tax hikes on American job creators, which would make our economy worse."

Boehner said that Democrats rejected the GOP's tax reform proposals because they didn't include tax hikes.

But Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told a different story in a dueling op-ed in USA Today, saying that the committee stalled because Republicans refused to budge on revenue.

"Democrats were prepared to strike a grand bargain that would make painful cuts while asking millionaires to pay their fair share, and we put our willingness on paper," he said. "But Republicans never came close to meeting us halfway."

Reid also blamed extremists groups for the gridlock. (read more)

He's not on the Super Committee - he's not even a member of Congress - but Grover Norquist wants you to know that it's not his fault if the Super Committee fails.

The deficit-reduction committee is likely to announce Monday that they've failed to produce an economic plan before this week's deadline, largely because the Republican and Democrat members disagree on whether or not to raise revenues as part of the solution.

Norquist, who heads the conservative think-tank Americans for Tax Reform, has, over several years, gotten almost every Republican member of Congress to sign a pledge promising to never vote to raise taxes. Some Democratic members of the Super Committee are now blaming that pledge for the gridlock between the two parties over the tax issue.

"One of the problems has been a pledge that too many Republicans took to a Republican wealthy lobbyist by the name of Grover Norquist," Super Committee member Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, told CNN. "As long as we have some Republican lawmakers who feel more enthralled with a pledge they took to a Republican lobbyist than they do to a pledge to the country to solve the problems, this is going to be hard to do."

But Norquist said his pledge isn't to blame. (read more)

Consider the impact -- the Super Committee co-chairs still have not agreed on a way to put this whole debt reduction effort out of its misery (and that's the expectation now: failure). But the ramifications of failure so far have largely gone unnoticed.

The thinking now seems to be to announce something after the markets close Monday, even though the markets don't seem to care and have already absorbed this failure.

But here at the end of the congressional session, Congress has only approved three of 13 annual spending bills. They'll be focused on that even moreso now, especially given that the current continuing resolution that keeps government running expires on Dec. 16.

Congress is also going to need to deal with extending the expiring payroll tax holiday that was in the original stimulus bill. It will need to renew expiring unemployment insurance benefits, though some conservative Republicans have called for reforming that system first.

It will need to stop the doctors receiving Medicare payments from being hit with a whopping cut  -- something on the order of 25 percent -- to their federal government reimbursement payments. (This is the annual "doctor fix" fight.)

As well, Congress will need to "patch" the Alternative Minimum Tax, so middle class taxpayers aren't swallowed up by it. (read more)

In an increasingly rare occurrence, Mitt Romney took questions Saturday from the press after holding a town hall in Peterborough, New Hampshire, saying he would not support any plan negotiated by the congressional Super Committee that raised taxes.

"I believe the right answer is cutting taxes, so I will not endorse any plan that raises revenues, raises taxes."

His remarks come days after fellow Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who serves on the 12 member deficit panel, proposed a plan to raise roughly $300 billion in revenue by limiting tax breaks for some, in an effort to reach a deal before the November 23rd looming deadline.

When questioned at the town hall about how he would bring about compromise in Congress, Romney cited his experience reaching across the aisle as governor of the largely democratic state of Massachusetts and continued to say there is "no substitute for a strong leader" who can reach common ground without "abandoning principles."

Though Romney made it clear that raising taxes would not be an area of compromise.

"There will be a lot of give and take of proposals made and yet I will not support any proposal based upon increasing taxes or revenues. I will support proposals reducing spending" (read more)