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Top Senate Democrats have prepared a plan to slice the Pentagon's budget by $3 billion a year in an attempt to avoid far steeper cuts this year that defense hawks warn would cripple the military.

Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, plans to seek a vote on Chuck Hagel's nomination as President Barack Obama's new secretary of defense during a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the committee said on Monday.

A leading Republican senator is threatening to hold up Senate confirmation of President Obama's nominees to lead the Defense Department and the CIA until the White House provides more answers about the deadly Sept. 11 attack against a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Saturday that there's a chance Republicans will filibuster former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel's nomination as secretary of defense. "Sen. Hagel did not do a very good job before the Armed Services committee," McConnell said. "I think the opposition to him is intensifying. Whether that means he will end up having to achieve 60 votes or 51 is not clear yet." McConnell did not say how he planned to vote.

The Senate is trying again to accomplish what Congress failed to do last year - extend the federal government's chief means of protecting women from domestic abuse while broadening those protections for Native Americans, gays and lesbians....

Former senator Scott Brown will not run for the seat of departing Sen. John Kerry in Massachusetts, saying Friday he was unsure "of returning to a Congress even more partisan than the one I left."

The sense that Chuck Hagel performed poorly in his confirmation hearing has buoyed the outside groups that have been working to defeat his nomination, many of them financed by donors who refuse to identify themselves (and are not legally compelled to do so).

White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Friday he believes former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who had a rocky confirmation hearing on Thursday, will be confirmed by the Senate as U.S. defense secretary.

Making his first public comments after his nomination to lead the Pentagon, former Sen. Chuck Hagel said he stood by his record but also urged senators to look beyond controversial votes and statements he made that critics have seized on.

Lamar Alexander won’t say what his opinion is on universal background checks because, as he says, video games are just a much bigger problem than guns when it comes to violent crime.