Frank James

With the Senate's passage of the debt-ceiling legislation and President Obama having signed it Tuesday afternoon, the nation no longer needs to worry about defaultmageddon, at least not until early 2013 when the U.S. Treasury once again runs out of the room to borrow again.

But even though there wasn't a default, the fight left plenty of wreckage laying about.

Among the casualties was Obama. Yes, he seemed to have narrowly averted becoming the first president to have the nation default during his term.

How does Speaker John Boehner, on Friday, get to the 216 House votes he needs to pass the debt-ceiling bill he couldn't get the votes for on Thursday?

He agrees to add a balanced-budget amendment provision to his legislation.

That addition appears to be enough to swing some Republican lawmakers to his side who had previously been against his bill or undecided.

Just as the Washington narrative had started to shift a bit from "House Speaker John Boehner doesn't have the juice to get his conference to support him" to "Boehner is getting his fellow Republicans to rally around him" it shifts back to the former.

That's because he was unable to get enough members of the Republican conference to commit to voting for his debt-ceiling increase.

Rep. David Wu, the first Chinese-American to serve in the House, announced Tuesday that he will resign, ending what seemed to be headed toward becoming another embarrassing congressional sex scandal.

The Oregon Democrat faced a House ethics investigation after allegations surfaced that he had what is being widely described as an "unwanted sexual encounter" with a teenager. The young person was the daughter of Wu's childhood friend.

The Oregonian reported:

Now that the one-on-one debt ceiling talks between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner have broken down, there are obviously more questions than answers about what exactly happened and where matters go from here.

Let's go through just a few of them.

The meta question is obviously will the nation's leaders be able to achieve a deal to raise the debt ceiling before Aug. 2, the date beyond which, the U.S. Treasury says, it won't be able to fend off a default?