The Hill reports that sources close to Republican lawmakers claim debate over the amount of spending to cut, not controversial policy riders that would affect programs like Planned Parenthood and the Environmental Protection Agency, caused the budget deal's delay:

House and Senate Democratic lawmakers spent most of Friday attacking Republicans for holding up a government funding measure over a controversial social policy rider to defund Planned Parenthood, but a source close to the situation said that Democratic attacks were "just a ruse."

In fact, the issue of how to handle the abortion-related rider was decided Thursday night: The Senate would take an up or down vote on the matter.

But White House officials told reporters early Saturday that funding for women’s health groups was the sticking point.

Full story here.

AP explores citizen reactions to the last-minute budget deal:

A collective sense of relief resonated across the nation Saturday, now that a federal government shutdown is merely a thought of what could have been.

Thousands of tourists poured into the Smithsonian museums in Washington – which would have been shuttered without Friday's late-night budget deal – to see artifacts like the original "Star-Spangled Banner" flag. And military families won't have to stock their freezers, not knowing when they might have another paycheck to put food on the table.

The only thing that rivals their comfort? Widespread disgust, knowing that political bickering made them cringe in the first place.

Read more here.

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), author of the GOP's controversial long-term budget proposal, said Friday's budget deal represents "79 percent of what we wanted," reports the New York Times.

AP reports on divisions in Washington:

Rivals in a divided government, President Barack Obama and the most powerful Republican in Congress split their differences to stave off a federal shutdown that neither combatant was willing to risk.

Their compromise is the result of a battle pitting the enduring power of the presidential veto and the White House soapbox – despite a "shellacking" in the last election – against a strong-willed GOP House speaker vaulted into office by a voter revolt against Washington's free-spending ways.

The resulting measure will bleed about $40 billion from the day-to-day budgets of domestic agencies over just the next six months, the biggest rollback of such government programs in history. It allows Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to claim his GOP shock troops had put Cabinet department operating budgets on track toward levels in place before Obama took office. In the end, the White House had to meet Boehner more than halfway on spending.

On the other side was a strong-willed Obama, who mostly succeeded in forcing Republicans to cave in on dozens of controversial conservative policy prescriptions – including rolling back environmental protections and cutting off Planned Parenthood from taxpayer assistance while protecting favored programs like education, clean energy and medical research.

It was, in short, the type of split-the-differences deal that a political scientist might have predicted from the start, given the realities of divided government.

More here.

In a new opinion piece for the New York Times, columnist Nick Kristof slams the actions of both Democrats and Republicans, lambasting the "self absorbed, reckless children" and detailing what he claims to be the harrowing consequences of the "vapid discourse" among lawmakers:

Democrats excoriated Republicans for threatening to shut down the government, but this mess is a consequence of the Democrats’ own failure to ensure a full year’s funding last year when they controlled both houses of Congress.

That’s when the budget should have been passed, before the fiscal year began on Oct. 1. But the Democrats were terror-stricken at the thought of approving spending bills that Republicans would criticize. So in gross dereliction of duty, the Democrats punted.

Republicans say they’re trying to curb government spending and rescue the economy — but they threatened to shut down the government, even though that would have been both expensive and damaging to our economy.

The shutdowns in late 1995 and early 1996 cost the federal government more than $1.4 billion, the Office of Management and Budget reported at the time. Much of that sum was for salaries repaid afterward for work that employees never did because they were on furlough. There were also lost fees at national parks and museums: tigers must be fed at the zoo, even if nobody is paying to see them.

Read the full column here.

In a new post on the White House blog, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer praised the efforts of lawmakers who worked to avoid a government shutdown, detailing the results of their negotiations:

This deal cuts spending by $78.5 billion from the President’s FY 2011 Budget request -- the largest annual spending cut in our history. These are real cuts that will save taxpayers money and have a real impact. Many will be painful, and are to programs that we support, but the fiscal situation is such that we have to act.

The two sides agreed to cut $13 billion from funding for programs at the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services as well as over $1 billion in a cut across non-defense agencies, forcing everyone to tighten their belt. There will be reductions to housing assistance programs and some health care programs along with $8 billion in cuts to our budget for State and Foreign Operations. These significant cuts to the State Department and foreign assistance will mean we will not meet some of the ambitious goals set for the nation in the President’s Budget.

Read the full post here.

With shutdown averted, the New York Times explores the next big hurdle for Congress:

Congressional Republicans are vowing that before they will agree to raise the current $14.25 trillion federal debt ceiling — a step that will become necessary in as little as five weeks — President Obama and Senate Democrats will have to agree to far deeper spending cuts for next year and beyond than those contained in the six-month budget deal agreed to late Friday night that cut $38 billion and averted a government shutdown.

Republicans have also signaled that they will again demand fundamental changes in policy on health care, the environment, abortion rights and more, as the price of their support for raising the debt ceiling.

In a letter last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told Congressional leaders the government would hit the limit no later than May 16. He outlined “extraordinary measures” — essentially moving money among federal accounts — that could buy time until July 8.

Full story here.

Ryan Grim reports from the White House pool:

POTUS bounded up the Lincoln Memorial steps before a cheering crowd, shaking hands with tourists atop the monument. “Hi everybody,” POTUS said. “I just wanted to say, real quick, that because Congress was able to settle its differences, that's why this place is open today and everybody’s able to enjoy their visit. And that's the kind of future cooperation I hope we have going forward. Because this is what America is all about: Everybody from different places enjoying those things that bind us together. It is wonderful to spend time with you guys, I hope you have a great time.” He descended slowly, shaking hands along the way, ignoring questions from the pool about the budget deal. POTUS was casually dressed in gray chinos and a black zip-up looking jacket.

The motorcade arrived back at the White House before 3:00 p.m. Riding with POTUS was Eric Whitaker, a longtime Chicago friend and golf companion of POTUS, and Marvin Nicholson, White House trip director and fellow golfer.

Politico reports on the "winners and losers" in 2011's shutdown showdown. According to Politico, the winners include the men behind the deal, namely Barry Jackson, David Krone and Rob Nabors:

With an hour and half before government shutdown, it wasn’t Reid, Boehner and Obama who shook hands to seal what the majority leader later called an “historic” agreement. It was their top liaisons who shook hands first, tucked away in a room on the fourth floor of the Capitol. It was a fitting end to a tortuous weeks-long negotiations process for Reid Chief of Staff Krone, Boehner Chief of Staff Jackson and White House legislative director Nabors — the men who continued to hammer away at an agreement, even as their bosses publicly traded jabs.

According to Politico, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Planned Parenthood are also "winners." Meanwhile, the report lists Washington, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and federal agencies as the losers.

Read the article here.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the next fight in Washington may be bigger, as lawmakers and government officials prepare to debate raising the limit on how much the government can borrow.

The stakes are higher in the next round, shifting from worries about closing national parks to concerns the U.S. government could default on its debt, triggering another financial crisis.

"It's one thing to play brinksmanship on a government shutdown, which can be fixed in a minute without many long-term consequences," said Lee Sachs, a former counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. "It's another thing to do it with the debt ceiling, where the impact of failure would be catastrophic for years, if not decades."

Read the full article here.

CNN's T.J. Holmes interviews Erica Roach, a Navy wife with two kids. He asks her how the budget debate has affected military families.

Roach says, "I very much am relieved that there's no shutdown, that we're going to get our paychecks. But... is it going to be okay on Thursday? Are we going to have to go through this again?"

CNN's political ticker reports that some Tea Party organizations are unhappy with Friday night's budget deal.

A spokesman for the Tea Party Express tells CNN the group isn't "very impressed" with the budget deal and says the agreement proves the Tea Party has a lot more work to do to make deeper cuts in the federal budget.

"According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. budget deficit in the first six months of the current fiscal year totaled $830 billion. So you can imagine we're not very impressed by a deal that cuts an almost trivial $38 billion," says Tea Party Express spokesman Levi Russell. "It just shows that the Tea Party has a lot more work to do in ousting the spending-addicted liberal Democrats who refuse to stop acting like selfish children incapable of making the tough decisions voters have demanded."

The New York Daily News reports that Tea Party members Michele Bachmann and Rand Paul are criticizing the budget deal.

Now, the Tea Party is reportedly placing even more focus on 2012. Read the full CNN article here.

President Obama has signed into law a provision to keep the federal government running through most of next week, reports The Washington Post.

On Saturday in the District, the Washington Monument opened as scheduled and the Cherry Blossom Festival went on as scheduled, as federal employees got word that they were to resume their normal working hours Monday. Lawmakers and staffers who had been working around the clock to break through the stalemate left the Capitol deserted.

While some politicians were happy that a compromise was reached, other members on both sides of the aisle were left feeling frustrated.

Read the full article here.

The National Journal's Hotline On Call reports that for some House Republicans, the deal doesn't cut enough spending. According to Rep. Dennis Ross's chief of staff, Ross will not support the deal:

"He firmly believes that $39 billion is not enough, especially considering, as we understand it, that $39 billion is not all new savings, but takes into account previous cuts," Fred Piccolo, Ross's top aide, told us.

"The promises of votes and studies are encouraging, but in the end, it is about how much we will borrow against our children's future," Piccolo added. "[Ross] cannot support the 'deal.'"

More here.

Matt Yglesias, on his blog at Think Progress, writes that those who do not care about the interests of poor people may benefit by playing the "hostage taker." The blog cites House Speaker John Boehner as an example:

Details on the appropriations deal are still hard to come by, but you don’t need the details to know that substantial short-term cuts in domestic discretionary spending will hurt the poor while harming macroeconomic performance. The problem with not agreeing to the deal, of course, is that a government shutdown would also hurt the poor while harming macroeconomic performance. If you genuinely don’t care about the interests of poor people and stand to benefit electorally from weak economic growth, this gives you a very strong hand to play as a hostage taker. And John Boehner is willing to play that hand.

Read the full piece here.

John Nichols of The Nation writes that Democrat programs took serious hits in Friday's deal:

A Senate Appropriations Committee review says that most of the $2 billion in cuts contained in the one-week bill come from a $1.5 billion slashing of the Federal Railroad Administration’s High Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail program. More cuts are achieved by hacking $220 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Fund. And research into making air travel safer and more efficient took cuts as well.

In other words, precisely the sort of programs that Democrats used to defend were slashed.

Nichols goes on to say that the cuts went too far, and "we will need a lot more FDR Democrats to prevent the broader deal from becoming the greatest triumph yet in the GOP campaign to end the New Deal and bend the arc of history against progress."

Read the full article here.

Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, emails HuffPost’s Dan Froomkin that the shutdown showdown “bodes ill for the rest of the session. The 2011 CR was the easy part. Imagine the fireworks and possible delay in raising the debt ceiling and adopting funding for FY 2012. The balance of negative power in American government is now held by a large band of ideological extremists in the House, with a Speaker too weak to keep them from doing potentially great damage to our economy and reputation around the globe.”

The National Journal's Matthew Cooper writes that as the government stays open, the real fight has just begun.

Still, both Republicans and Democrats are girding for the next wars: the vote to raise the debt ceiling that’ll come this spring and could lead to the first federal default in American history if the tea party prevents it from being raised. Within moments of President Obama hailing the deal that was struck, the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he hoped that the debt limit vote would be an occasion for more spending cuts. And then there is next year’s budget where the House Republicans are already pushing the plan developed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who would cut some $6 trillion from the federal government over the next decade and voucherize Medicare. What’s past really is prologue.

The article goes on to say that fights will intensify over spending and social issues. Read the full piece here.

Carl Cameron writes for Fox News that the GOP “won the shutdown showdown." Cameron explains why Republicans think they came out on top:

Here's why: HR1 was originally to seek spending cuts of $32 billion until Tea Party conservatives insisted on more than $ 60 billion. House Speaker John Boehner won more cuts than he originally sought and got the Senate to agree to votes to defund the health care reform law and groups like the nation's largest abortion provider Planned Parenthood - once votes Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said he'd never allow to come to the floor. Back on February 3, Reid called $32 billion in cuts "extreme" and "draconian."

Cameron goes on to state that there were some silver linings for the Democrats:

There were no votes on defunding the EPA or PBS and NPR. Democrats fought for and won a $2 billion cut from the Department of Defense, knocking the military appropriation for the rest of the year down to $513 billion.

But the GOP had to be able to see this as a win in the end, because it is puny compared to what they want to do next.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's 2012 budget resolution proposes cuts of $5 TRILLION in the next 10 yrs.

Read the full piece here.

Washington Post's Dan Balz reports:

As the midnight Friday deadline loomed for a possible government shutdown, and politicians continued their rhetorical war of words, a larger message went out to the rest of the country: Washington is still broken...

Both sides agree that this should have been an easy battle, or the battle that never occurred. Instead, Democrats and Republicans took the country — and government workers — to the brink, exposing vulnerabilities that will shape future negotiations and, depending on the result, the next election.

“This is all just leading to 2012 and what is going to be a seismic election,” said Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Read more here.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Leaders of the small-government, tea-party movement are generally giving House Speaker John Boehner high marks for his leadership in the spending showdown, even though the agreement eventually reached Friday night fell short of the cuts the tea party once demanded.

The relationship between the Republican leadership and these activists is one of the most important determinants of how this Congress will manage the fiscal fights to come.

Read more here.

HuffPost's Elise Foley and Sam Stein:

As House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) briefed his conference on the broad strokes of a government funding bill, aides behind the scenes were still hammering out actual language and details, reaching a deal at about 10:30 p.m., a senior Senate leadership aide told reporters.

The aide said negotiators from the House Republicans, Senate Democrats and the White House met for a final time Friday evening, finally agreeing to a figure of roughly $38 billion. Each side made some final concessions: Democrats agreed to add half a billion dollars in additional cuts to mandatory spending, while Republicans agreed that no language related to Planned Parenthood and Title X funding would be in the short-term funding bill.

They finished negotiations only an hour and a half before government funding expired. If one chamber had not moved by about 11 p.m., the government would have begun to shut down, the aide said.

Full story here.

HuffPost's Elise Foley and Jon Ward:

Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), a leader of the Blue Dog Caucus whose votes were crucial to passage of a previous stopgap measure that was opposed by 54 conservative freshmen, said he thought the extension through Sept. 30 would pass with a similar mix of yes votes from conservative Democrats to make up for opposition from the most hardline fiscal hawks in the GOP.

"You're probably looking at something similar," Shuler, who said he will support the measure, told HuffPost on his way out of the House chamber after midnight.

"It's up to each individual, but I think you move forward, move on to the bigger things at hand," he added.

The vote on the six-day stopgap was an indicator on where opposition to the longer-term measure would come from, and it was not alarming to Republican leaders. The 70 votes against it came mostly from liberal Democrats, with only a few conservative Republicans voting nay: Reps. Louie Gohmert (Texas), Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Justin Amash (Mich.), Mick Mulvaney (S.C.), Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.), Joe Barton (Texas) and Jason Chaffetz (Utah).

As the vote wound down, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) sat next to one another in the chamber, talking and looking friendly and relaxed. Cantor then went and conferred with Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), standing and looking up to scour the vote board on the wall displaying how every one of the 435 members had voted on the stopgap.

HuffPost's Sam Stein reports:

House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) office has distributed a fact sheet outlining the policy and other victories Republican leaders are claiming in the final budget deal struck with the White House and Senate Democrats late Friday night.

In addition to the spending cuts, the document from the Speaker's office noted that the bill denies funding President Barack Obama had sought for additional Internal Revenue Service agents, guarantees an up-or-down Senate vote on stripping federal subsidies from Planned Parenthood and outlaws the use of federal money for abortion services in the District of Columbia.

The biggest gains that Boehner made in the continuing resolution's language, however, may be in combating the two major pieces of legislation passed by the president during his first two years in office. According to the fact sheet, the CR requires mandatory audits of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created under the Dodd-Frank financial-regulatory law. The audits will be conducted both by members of the private sector and by the Government Accountability Office “to monitor its impact on the economy, including its impact on jobs, by examining whether sound cost-benefit analyses are being used with rulemakings,” Boehner's staff wrote.

The budget bill also ensures that the Senate will vote on repealing Obama's signature health care law. That vote won't pass. More troublesome for the White House, however, may be the deal's mandated "numerous studies that will force the Obama Administration to reveal the true impact of the law’s mandates, including a study of how individuals and families will see increased premiums as a result of certain Obamacare mandates; a full audit of all the waivers that the Obama Administration has given to firms and organizations -- including unions -- who can't meet the new annual coverage limits; a full audit of what's happening with the comparative effectiveness research funding that was in Obamacare and the president’s failed 'stimulus' spending bill; and a report on all of the contractors who have been hired to implement the law and the costs to taxpayers of such contracts."

HuffPost's Jon Ward reports:

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) told The Huffington Post on his way into the House chamber to vote on the weeklong stopgap budget bill that he is "leaning against" voting for the longer-term budget resolution "because the cuts are inadequate."

He also said of the controversial abortion provision: "We're told the ban on D.C. funding is in" the provision that would extend government operations through the end of the fiscal year.

HuffPost's Sam Stein reports:

Speaking moments after a budget deal was announced, President Barack Obama hailed the compromise to avert a government shutdown as an important, if painful, breakthrough.

With the Washington Monument as a backdrop, the president said business would continue as usual in Washington. In his brief remarks, Obama sought mostly to sell the public on the tenets of the deal, adopting an almost Tea Party-like zeal for budgetary belt-tightening while noting that social issues had been removed from the debate.

This was, Obama said, the “largest annual spending cut in our history.”

“Both sides had to make tough decisions and give ground on issues that were important to them, and I certainly did that,” said Obama. “Some of the cuts we agreed to will be painful … I would not have made these cuts in better circumstances, but beginning to live within our means is the only way to protect those investments … we need to win the future.”