Previewing the Dec. 15 Sunday shows

A bipartisan budget deal will take center stage on the Sunday talk shows. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wa., each chamber’s budget chairs, hammered out a compromise that easily passed the House on Thursday and heads to the Senate next week.

NBC’s Meet the Press touts an exclusive with both Ryan and Murray. Fox News Sunday has Ryan by himself, and CBS’s Face the Nation takes the Senate angle with John McCain, R-Ariz., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

To refresh your memory, the budget deal sets spending limits through 2015. It loosens the purse strings of the sequester by about $63 billion and makes up for that higher spending with $85 billion in user fees and spending cuts that play out over the next ten years. The Congressional Budget Office scores the bill as reducing deficits by $23 billion through 2023.

That timing -- higher spending now in exchange for more revenues and cuts down the road -- angered conservative groups, including Heritage Action and Club for Growth. They told House Republicans to vote against it, and after the bill passed with the support of 162 GOP lawmakers, Heritage Action urged its followers to see how their representative voted.

All this angered House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who called the attacks misleading and said the groups had "lost all credibility."

So this should make for some interesting panel discussions that PunditFact will follow closely.

On other topics, ABC’s This Week features John Kerry, and we expect a focus on Iran’s nuclear program and possible moves by Congress to impose stiffer sanctions. Should that happen, it would gut the administration’s efforts to secure a short-term deal. Under the terms of the tentative agreement, Iran would slow down parts of its program and permit international inspectors, in exchange for a modest easing of sanctions. Syria and North Korea are also on the agenda.

Fox News Sunday marks the one-year anniversary of the Newtown shootings. It has invited Mark Kelly, husband of former Arizona House member and shooting victim Gabrielle Giffords, and Larry Pratt with the Gun Owners of America to talk about gun control.

Then there are the pundits. We’ll see:

This Week:

Cokie Roberts, ABC News

Newt Gingrich, Former House Speaker, Co-Host, CNN’s "Crossfire"

Robert Reich, Former Clinton Labor Secretary, Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Ana Navarro, Republican Strategist, CNN Contributor

Andrea Elliot, Investigative Reporter, The New York Times

Face the Nation:

Tom Friedman, New York Times

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic

Radhika Jones, Time

Clarissa Ward, CBS

Meet the Press:

Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico and ambassador

Nancy Gibbs, managing editor, Time

Kathleen Parker, Washington Post columnist

Steve Inskeep, National Public Radio