His Thursday speech amounted to his second Claude Rains “Casablanca” moment of this week: the French police captain “shocked, shocked” that there’s gambling in Rick’s Café. “It’s unbelievable, really,” McConnell protested about the omnibus. “They want us to ram this gigantic, trillion-dollar bill through Congress — and they’re using the Christmas break as an inducement to get us to vote for it.”

Beyond the theatrics, McConnell’s shift — and his work behind the scenes to pull back Republican votes Thursday — does harden the political lines.

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As a fallback, the House last week narrowly approved a yearlong, stripped-down continuing resolution, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) conceded this also can’t get the 60 votes to cut off debate.

For the White House, this is the worst case scenario because of the potential for another disruptive “shut down the government” veto fight in February, even as the president is trying to roll out his new budget for 2012.

The GOP paid a heavy price when it did the same in 1995 to then President Bill Clinton, but Obama isn’t without risks. The great mistake Republicans made in 1995 was to bring another issue — Medicare — into the appropriations standoff. But if the GOP learns and simply cuts spending, Obama will find it harder to veto the bill for fear he will be accused of shutting down the government himself.

Ironically, the man he will need most then is Inouye, someone the White House didn’t help in this fight.

Two Cabinet departments most impacted are Defense and State. In what proved a vain effort, Defense Secretary Robert Gates weighed in during a White House appearance on Thursday again in support of the omnibus. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later urged her former Senate colleagues to find compromise on the bill.

“We need these resources now more than ever to support national security priorities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where we are helping secure gains made by our military and preventing the spread of violent extremism,” Clinton said. “Our budget is being used to help stabilize the global economy, combat extreme poverty, demolish transnational criminal networks, stop global health pandemics and address the threat of climate change.”

“These are not partisan issues; they are national imperatives,” Clinton said.