WASHINGTON (AP) -- Racing the clock to avoid a government default, President Barack Obama and Republican congressional leaders reached historic agreement Sunday night on a compromise to permit vital U.S. borrowing by the Treasury in exchange for more than $2 trillion in long-term spending cuts.

Officials said Speaker John Boehner telephoned Obama at mid-evening to say the agreement had been struck.

No votes were expected in either house of Congress until Monday at the earliest, to give rank and file lawmakers time to review the package.

Details are gradually emerging; apparently, the rank-and-file legislators will have a final version to review by the morning.

Let's be clear about something:  The Boehner and Reid bills are nearly identical, but you'd never know that based on the debate these past two weeks.  The bills differ by only $2 billion (less than 1/10 of 1% of the budget) in spending next year, and both raise the debt limit by more than $2 trillion.  The Senate's caps war spending; the House's has an unenforceable pledge to pass a constitutional balanced budget amendment (which may not even be in the final "compromise" that's allegedly ready for a vote).

So, in exchange for this nation going "upside down" on the debt-to-GDP ratio, we have a non-binding pledge to at some nebulous point in the future pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a limit on war spending which can be changed as soon as an actual budget is passed in the Senate, and a "promise" to "cut" spending by an amount that isn't much more than a rounding error in the budget bottom line.

And in the meantime, we're screwed anyway because "republican" leadership didn't have the balls to stick to Cut, Cap, and Balance.