Nightly News   |  April 08, 2011

Chuck Todd: 'Safe to say a deal is at hand'

NBC's Chuck Todd reports that a sticking point over federal funding for abortions has been resolved, moving Congress closer to cutting a budget deal.

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This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>> at this hour, just exactly where do thing s stand in washington. chuck todd joins me for hopefully an answer to that. what are you hearing?

>> reporter: we're close to being able to say a deal is at hand. why, because the issue about abortion and planned parenthood and this rider that money would be denied to any health care facility that performed abortions even using private money , woo know it's illegal for federal taxpayer dollars to be used on abortions, that has been resolved. i had two aides on capitol hill say that and a democratic aide say it's close. but if it has been resolved and one may be to delay the vote on this. you take it out of this budget deal and republicans take it up as a separate stand-alone deal. that's a face saver for speaker boehner . he's able to say, look, you're going to get another shot at voting for this, but it isn't worth shutting down the government, and kate, the other problem speaker boehner was facing was a lot of senate republicans have been putting more and more pressure on boehner to drop the riders and cut a deal, so we're very close. maybe within an hour or so.

>> that's good news, chuck todd .