A vote on President Barack Obama's nominee to lead the Defense Department, Supreme Court arguments about the future of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act and the expected onset of automatic spending cuts known as the "sequester" mean the nation's capital is bracing for a politically consequential week ahead.

After a weeklong recess, Congress returns to Washington with a full agenda of business that needs handling. Topping that list is an item which lawmakers are arguably unlikely to resolve over the course of the week: the sequester, about $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to begin taking effect on Friday, the first day of March.

Lawmakers left town before the President's Day holiday no closer to resolving the sequester, the second part of the so-called "fiscal cliff," which was delayed for two months by the New Year's Day deal on taxes.

Last week's recess was more full of posturing and blame-placing by Obama and Republicans in Congress — who each blame the other for the sequester's creation — than any substantive progress toward a deal to address the cuts, which both sides agree would be perilous.

"So now Republicans in Congress face a simple choice: Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and health care and national security and all the jobs that depend on them?" Obama said last Tuesday at the White House. "Or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special-interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations? That's the choice."

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, responded in the pages of the 'Wall Street Journal': "The president's sequester is the wrong way to reduce the deficit, but it is here to stay until Washington Democrats get serious about cutting spending." 

The administration has been warning of the potential consequences to the spending cuts, including military readiness and even delays and inconveniences in air travel.

Related: Why Obama has the PR upper hand in sequestration battle

"We're not making this up in order to put pain on the American people," outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We are required to cut a billion dollars and we are going to do that unless Congress gets together and works together and compromises on this." 

With both sides still so far apart, an agreement to delay or soften the blow of the automatic cuts before Friday seems unlikely.

That legislative showdown would normally suffice to consume all the political oxygen in Washington. But this week also features several other major events worth noting.

One such item is another holdover from before recess. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on final confirmation for former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to become the next defense secretary. The vote follows tenacious efforts by some Republican senators to block their former colleague from joining the Obama administration.

Senate Democrats had hoped to formally vote to confirm Hagel before last week's recess, but Senate Republicans — even some GOP senators who said they'll support final confirmation for Hagel — joined together to sustain a filibuster, and delay the confirmation vote until this week. For their part, Democrats decried the filibuster as unprecedented against a Pentagon chief's nomination.

Still, Hagel appears to be headed toward confirmation. Some of his most vociferous critics — Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., among them — said they would support moving toward a final vote on confirmation, which would only require a simple majority of the Senate's support. Even still, several GOP senators have said they intend to support Hagel, which only boosts his prospects for confirmation, barring some sort of development.

Hagel isn't the only member of Obama's prospective national security team left hanging over the recess.

After facing a grilling earlier this month before the Senate Intelligence Committee, John O. Brennan's nomination to become the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency faces an uncertain future. Senators are looking for more information about the Obama administration's secretive drone strikes program — and Brennan's role in crafting that strategy — before moving forward with his nomination.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has threatened to filibuster Brennan's nomination before the whole Senate until he's received a satisfactory answer. The concerns about Brennan aren't isolated to Republicans, either; Democrats like Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon have voiced similar misgivings about the secretive use of drone strikes to target suspected terrorists and the process behind them.

Joshua Roberts / Reuters file photo

Capitol Hill in Washington, DC

Also this week, the Supreme Court will hear potentially consequential oral arguments challenging a section of the historic Voting Right Acts. The justices will hear a challenge to a section of the law requiring nine states with a history of racial discrimination to seek Justice Department approval for any change in their voting procedures before those changes can take effect.

Obama, speaking Thursday in a radio interview, sought to calm fears that African American or other minority voters would face greater challenges to voting if the Supreme Court were to strike down that section of the law.

"I know in the past some folks have worried that if the Supreme Court strikes down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, they're going to lose their right to vote. That’s not the case," Obama said on "The Black Eagle" radio show. "People will still have the same rights not to be discriminated against when it comes to voting, you just won't have this mechanism, this tool, that allows you to kind of stay ahead of certain practices."

All inaugural addresses are not created equal, but through the course of the nation’s history, presidents have used the occasion to sketch their visions on topics as old as the republic itself – unity, sacrifice and the proper role of government.

By the time Barack Obama delivered his first inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2009, he had already become famous as an orator with his smashing debut at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and his Iowa caucus victory speech in January 2008.

“There is not a liberal America and conservative America – there is the United States of America,” he declared in the 2004 speech.

A star was born that night and his exhilarating speech on the night he won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 proved to his fans that his rhetorical skill could carry him to the presidency.

He claimed victory in Iowa over those who "said this country was too divided, too disillusioned, to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do.”

By the time Obama stood up to take his oath of office at the Capitol, the improbable had become reality. The “cynics” had long since been vanquished.

Like other presidents in their inaugural addresses, Obama in 2009 faced the familiar tasks of sounding a call for national renewal and proclaiming a faith in ordinary Americans.

As Bill Clinton had said in his first inaugural in 1993, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” Many inaugural speeches – from Thomas Jefferson’s in 1801 to Ronald Reagan’s in 1981 to Obama’s in 2009 -- are elaborations of the upbeat theme that Clinton sounded in 1993.

Since an inauguration – especially a first one – is a fresh start, the newly sworn-in president naturally will proclaim that voters have brought about long-overdue change. “You have changed the face of Congress, the presidency and the political process itself.” That wasn’t Obama speaking in 2009; it was Bill Clinton in his 1993 inaugural address.

Moral improvement
Obama’s first inaugural seems at certain points remarkably personal. In it he did not mention his mother, whom he had often evoked in his 2008 campaign speeches, but he did twice mention his father – whom he never saw after he was 10 years old.

His own life story and the nation’s history were uniquely intertwined, Obama implied, alluding at one point to all the people around the globe watching him taking the oath, including the people in “the small village where my father was born” in Kenya.

He said America’s ability to reform itself was “why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”

Obama offered a strikingly optimistic view of every nation’s ability to become more like America at its best: capable of moral improvement, tolerant, and committed to unifying and noble ideals, without regard to a person’s ethnicity or skin color.

“Because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself,” he said.

His defeat of John McCain in the November election and of Hillary Clinton and other rivals in the Democratic primaries was a victory of ideals: “We have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”

Like Clinton in 1993, Obama said that voters had changed the American political system itself: “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

As for just one of the specific promises Obama made in that speech: “We will wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost.”

He did sign into law a landmark health care overhaul but whether its provisions will lower the cost of medical care has yet to be determined.

Role of government
Obama used his inaugural to join the long-running debate with small government conservatives – a debate that Clinton had joined in his second inaugural address in 1997.

Slideshow: Inaugural history: From Lincoln to Obama

Abraham Lincoln swore the oath in front of an incomplete Capitol dome. Lyndon B. Johnson became president on Air Force One next to a dazed Jacqueline Kennedy. A collection of photographs from past presidential inaugurations.

Launch slideshow

Reagan had said in 1981, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

In his 1997 inaugural, Clinton rebutted Reagan, or at least tried to redefine the debate: “We have resolved for our time a great debate over the role of government. Today we can declare: government is not the problem, and government is not the solution. We – the American people – we are the solution.”

Obama, once again assailing unnamed “cynics” as he did in his Iowa speech, said in his inaugural address that his election allowed Americans to move beyond old arguments about the size of the federal government.

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them; that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply,” he declared. “The question we ask today is not whether our Government is too big or too small, but whether it works; whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.”

So far, that last promise has not yet been kept: Obama has significantly expanded the federal role in health care but hasn’t yet ended any major federal program.

What makes an inaugural speech one for the history books is a president’s eloquence at a moment of national crisis. Very few inaugural addresses are, like Lincoln’s immortal and remarkably short (701 words) second inaugural, carved in their entirety in granite on the National Mall or anywhere else, but on some rare occasions a president’s words do seem to define an era.

Franklin Roosevelt did that in 1933, at the depth of the gravest economic crisis of modern times, attacking what he called “the unscrupulous money changers” whose practices “stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.”

He said, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.”

That scalding attack on Wall Street is less well remembered today than FDR’s serene confidence in a dark hour: “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

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Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

President Obama returns to the White House on Thursday after cutting short a holiday in Hawaii. He will hold at least one meeting with House and Senate leaders to try to avoid the "fiscal cliff."

President Barack Obama and lawmakers were launching a last-chance round of budget talks days before a New Year's deadline to reach a deal or watch the economy go off a "fiscal cliff."

NBC News has confirmed that Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will meet with House and Senate leaders on Friday afternoon to try to revive negotiations to avoid tax hikes and spending cuts -- together worth $600 billion -- that will otherwise begin to take effect on Jan. 1.  Scheduled to attend the Oval Office meeting are Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Speaker John Boehner and (R-Ohio), and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Members were divided on the odds of success, with a few expressing hope, some talking as if they had abandoned it, and a small but growing number suggesting Congress might try to stretch the deadline into the first two days of January.

What happens to you if US goes off 'cliff'

In order to be ready to legislate if an agreement takes shape, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives convened a session for Sunday.

And House Majority Leader Eric Cantor advised members to be prepared to meet through Jan. 2, the final day before the swearing-in of the new Congress elected on Nov. 6.

It "doesn't feel like anything that's very constructive is going to happen" as a result of the meeting with Obama, said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). "It feels more like optics than anything that's real."

Politics: Lawmakers brace for blame

The two political parties remained far apart, particularly over plans to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans to help close the U.S. budget deficit. But one veteran Republican, Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, held out the prospect that if Obama came through with significant spending cuts, Republicans in the House might compromise on taxes.

Reuters contributed to this report. 

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WASHINGTON -- Appearing at an annual gathering of conservative Christian voters, former presidential candidate Rick Santorum accused President Barack Obama of "coddling and appeasing" America's enemies and said the Obama administration is at least partially responsible for ongoing violence in post-Arab Spring nations.

"This president has to take a share of the responsibility for what the Middle East looks like today because he helped structure it," Santorum told attendees at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., adding that Obama has "turned his back" on allies like Israel and the government of Egypt.

"He has sent a very clear message to that area of the world," he said of Obama. "If you're a friend of the United States, you're on your own. If you are an enemy of the United States, let's talk."

Anti-U.S. protests rocked over 20 nations across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia this week, and four Americans were killed during an attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has slammed the Obama administration for "apologizing" for American values in its dealings with Islamic militants, a sentiment that his former rival Santorum echoed today.

"Gov. Romney boldly went out and called this administration on their policies, their weak, lead-from-behind appeasing policies against those who threaten us and our security," Santorum said. "He stood up and called them what they were."

While he fought bitterly against the now-GOP nominee in the Republican primary, the former Pennsylvania senator repeatedly praised Romney before the audience of Christian social conservatives, a group that represents the backbone of Santorum's political base.

"I'm so encouraged that Gov. Romney has embraced some of the things I campaigned upon and that you across America have encouraged me to give voice to," he said. "He's giving voice to those things because he understands who we are. Mitt Romney understands America. He understands those values. And he shares those values."

Fresh off their win in North Carolina, opponents of gay marriage are pushing forward to enact similar constitutional amendments in more states this fall – and to actually override pro-gay marriage legislation in two others.

Foes of gay marriage now have won 31 popular votes on the issue, and they hope to extend their gains with ballot initiatives in Minnesota, Maine, Washington and Maryland.

“North Carolina once again reminds us that there is an unshakeable majority of Americans firmly wedded to the idea of traditional marriage,” said Thomas Peters, cultural director of the National Organization for Marriage. “We look forward to seeing that movement grow in the months ahead.”

With North Carolina voters approving a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage by more than 20 percentage points, 38 states now have statutes or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. For the moment, that number includes California, where a federal court has overturned its constitutional amendment, known as Prop. 8 – a decision that has been appealed and could make it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Same-sex marriage is legal in eight states, plus the District of Columbia.

Despite their loss in North Carolina, advocates of same-sex marriage are not giving up. They got a boost on Wednesday, when President Barack Obama said he supported their cause, days after Vice President Joe Biden said he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage.

“[North Carolina] was certainly a heartbreaking loss, but the fight goes on and we will continue to march forward. We remain optimistic that we will achieve full marriage equality in all 50 states, it’s only a matter of time,” said Paul Guequierre, a spokesman for Human Rights Campaign, which works on equal rights for the LGBT community. “We know that we’ll face more referendums and we will be at the ballot boxes pushing for people to vote for marriage equality in those states where we have to do that.”

Fifty percent of Americans think same-sex marriage should be legal and bestow the same rights as traditional marriage, compared to 48 percent who don’t, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. Support for gay marriage fell slightly in the new Gallup poll from a record high of 53 percent in 2011 -- the first time a majority of Americans favored gay marriage -- while opposition rose from 45 percent.

Opponents of same-sex marriage discount national polls and say they are plugging away at getting marriage defined as between one man and one woman in all 50 states: They are campaigning for a constitutional amendment that will go before voters in Minnesota, and are opposing an initiative that would provide for same-sex marriage in Maine. They are also working on gathering enough signatures to overturn statutes in Maryland and Washington state that legalized gay marriage, and are giving $2 million to efforts to unseat Republicans who helped the legislation pass last year in New York.

First Read: Obama's careful line on same-sex marriage
Gay marriage opponents: North Carolina no longer 'vulnerable' 

“The only poll that matters is the vote that happens the day of the election in every state,” Peters said. ”We won 31 times ... so 33, 34, 35 doesn’t seem so unlikely.”

In Maryland, supporters of gay marriage knew their opponents would push for a voter referendum after state lawmakers approved gay marriage earlier this year. They expect the referendum to make it on the ballot, because the number of signatures required is relatively low at 56,000, said Kevin Nix, a spokesman for Marylanders for Marriage Equality.

“There’s no doubt that we’re disappointed from [Tuesday] night. So, I think that what happened in North Carolina serves as a wake-up call … to re-motivate everybody,” he said, noting he thought the vote in Maryland would be a “nail biter” but was optimistic they would prevail.

In Washington state, opponents of gay marriage have collected 70,000 signatures out of 120,577 needed by June 6 to get the issue on the November ballot, said Christopher Plante, deputy campaign manager for Preserve Marriage Washington. He believes they will get the signatures they need.

“... the vote in North Carolina being so overwhelming in going 'against the tide’ of the polls and all of the pundits who said it was going to be too close to call, will certainly encourage Washington voters and Washington marriage supporters to continue this fight and to bring it to fruition,” he said.

While the North Carolina outcome appears to have emboldened opponents of gay marriage -- especially after a vacuum of four years since the last vote on a constitutional amendment on the issue -- same-sex marriage advocates should take heart, said John Dinan, a professor of political science at Wake Forest University.

“It’s a long-term effort to ... educate residents of the state about your arguments, about your concerns and about, ultimately, your cause,” he said. “It was a loss, but could also be seen as part of an overall stepping stone” in a longer campaign. 

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