WH Plan for Detroit Still in Garage

Dec. 14, 2008 -- The White House is not expected to wrap up a bailout for Detroit's Big Three automakers by Monday, leaving stocks open to a yet another potential selloff and the clock ticking down to what automakers say could soon become an inevitable bankruptcy.

With the president making an unannounced stop in Baghdad Sunday and Treasury Department officials spending the weekend poring over the account books of Detroit's Big Three's automakers, White House officials would not say what -- or when -- they would offer. But a senior White House official insisted a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is still a possibility.

With each day, automakers say it is growing more likely.

"We, literally, are talking about days, whether or not suppliers will stop shipping out parts because they can't get paid," Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., told ABC News in an interview.

Republican standard-bearer Sen. John McCain told ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" that at least some of the automakers should file Chapter 11, adding, "If not bankruptcy, certainly a bankruptcy-like solution which forces everybody to sit down at the table and redo all those agreements."

Yet bankruptcy is by no means inevitable. Michigan lawmakers insist the White House has made them promises.

"They have reassured us they don't intend to let the industry go down," Stabenow told ABC. "I think that is something that they have pondered very carefully."

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich, told CBS, "I think it's very likely the White House will do what it said it's going to do, not allow the industry to collapse."

The Republican senator who sought to close the deal that collapsed in Congress last week says those same terms are likely to prevail in a White House industry rescue plan to be offered as soon as this week.

"I think it's in the neighborhood of $14 billion," said Sen. Bob Corker, T-Tenn. "And I hope that if they choose not to do it through Congress but themselves, that they'll put in place exactly the same concepts that we almost agreed to the other night.