The debate is over how many tens of billions to cut (in the throes of a recession), and nobody has successfully challenged the following nonsense from Eric Cantor:

We do not want to shut the government down. We don't accept the status quo. We don't want to bankrupt this nation. We believe there is a fiscal crisis demanding urgent action.

And as someone already noted above, Planned Parenthood doesn't and can't use federal funds for abortion now anyway. They're used for women's health and reproductive services, including increasing access to birth control.

However, the hard right of the Republican Party doesn't like this. They believe having sex should have consequences - preferably a baby. This is exactly why Republicans oppose the use of stem cells in experimentation to cure disease, but you'll never see a protest in front of a fertility clinic no matter how many viable embryos those businesses "kill".

Last December, the Democrats gave us DADT repeal in exchange for the Bush tax cut and now they're angling to give us Planned Parenthood in exchange for massive, immediate cuts in discretionary spending. At some point you have to wonder if everyone isn't getting exactly what they want out of this deal --- except, of course, those who are already clinging to the lowest rungs of society and working people. link

Numerous GOP and Democratic sources on and off Capitol Hill tell National Journal that the outline of the deal is as follows: up to $39 billion in cuts from the 2010 budget, $514 billion for the defense budget covering the remainder of this fiscal year, a GOP agreement to abandon controversial policy riders dealing with Planned Parenthood and the EPA, and an agreement to pass a "bridge" continuing resolution tonight to keep the government operating while the deal is written in bill form [...]

The proposal under review could form the basis of an agreement on a six-month continuing resolution that averts a government shutdown of longer than a few days. The prospective measure would cut spending by about $39 billion from current levels, two aides said. It would not include a ban on federal funding for Planned Parenthood, but part of the arrangement would likely be an unspecified and symbolic procedural step intended to give Boehner and conservatives political cover on the issue, the aides said. Democratic appear to have accepted an increased level of cuts in exchange for the GOP dropping the rider.

Who wants to calculate the cost of "saving" Planned Parenthood and the EPA?

David Dayen and Ryan Grim:

You have to go back to the initial numbers to see the magnitude of this policy loss. In December, when a continuing resolution for the rest of the year was getting negotiated, the level of funding for FY 2011 was markedly higher than it will be under this deal. Ryan Grim runs the numbers.

The difference comes from the starting point. Democrats are working off of the president's requested budget for the fiscal year, which was $1.128 trillion. That's the same baseline that House Republicans used when they cut $102 billion with their first bill, H.R. 1, bringing the spending down to $1.026 trillion.

But there is a number that realistically could have become law, and that's the one that was proposed by Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). Known as the Sessions-McCaskill level, it blew up in December over a fight over earmarks, but it had the broad support of both parties in general.

That figure was $1.108 trillion -- $58 billion above what Democrats are now willing to accept.

That was written before this latest deal, so it's actually $59 billion. And the benefit for exchanging the Making Work Pay tax cut with the payroll tax cut, one of the only changes in the tax cut deal that didn't simply extend current law? $60 billion. So if you accept that Democrats could have gotten Sessions-McCaskill into the tax cut deal, four months later almost the ENTIRE stimulus from the payroll tax cut is gone. Completely. As Ryan notes, "The focus on Planned Parenthood may be distracting from a dramatic GOP victory on spending."

The $513 defense budget is precisely the level that Senate appropriators targeted back in December. So the defense budget is basically getting out of this untouched. Republicans tried to up that defense budget above the Pentagon's request, so that was beaten back.

This means that all $29 billion in cuts - remember $10 billion have already been enacted - will come from the non-defense budget. The latest on that is that about half will come from the discretionary budget, and half from mandatory spending. This spreads the pain, but there's a great deal of uncertainty about what those cuts will mean in the specifics.