If the committee doesn't come up with an agreement, $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts to domestic and defense programs are set to take effect starting in January 2013. The lack of a deal would deprive President Barack Obama of a vehicle extending a payroll tax cut and insurance benefits for unemployed Americans, which expire at the end of the year.

It would also push into an election year the difficult work of reaching a bipartisan deal to head off the automatic cuts that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called "devastating" for the Pentagon. Many lawmakers cast doubt on whether anything will happen before the 2012 election if the committee doesn't come up with a deal.

Waiting Until 2013

"We're going to have to wait for the next election," said Senator Christopher Coons, a Delaware Democrat who appeared on ABC's "This Week" program. "I never thought the supercommittee was a good idea," said Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican who appeared on the same program.

The supercommittee was designed to be the solution to more than a year's worth of failed bipartisan efforts to strike a "grand bargain" to drive down the debt. Obama's fiscal commission last December didn't agree on a $4 trillion package, pushing the work off to a group led by Vice President Joe Biden and bipartisan members of Congress.

The president and House Speaker John Boehner ultimately took over those negotiations, before delegating the task of constructing a larger package to the supercommittee. With an eye to congressional approval ratings that began to sink to as low as 13 percent in a mid-August Gallup poll, Republicans insisted that the committee would deliver.

"This joint select committee was set up to succeed," McConnell said to reporters Nov. 1. On Nov. 14, Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, reiterated that "failure is absolutely not an option." He said "the American people expect us to get to work and do our job."

Shouldering Blame

Republicans may shoulder more blame for the panel's failure. According to a Nov. 11-13 CNN poll, 42 percent of respondents said they would hold Republicans responsible if the supercommittee doesn't reach agreement, with 32 percent saying they'd blame Democrats. The margin of error was three percentage points.

"It was Washington's answer to kicking the can down the road," said Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who was a member of a bipartisan group of six senators working on a similar package this year. "That's what America's upset about," he said in a taped interview on C-SPAN's "Newsmakers."

Absent a last-minute breakthrough, the debate in Washington will now focus on the so-called trigger and the automatic cuts slated to start in 2013.