Over in the House, legislative aides denied that surveillance hawks could cobble together the necessary 218 votes to give the Patriot Act's key surveillance provision a short-term extension that has become McConnell's fallback gambit.
We tried to cobble together a 35% coalition of our core vote, disaffected Lib Dems, Greens and Ukip supporters.
But throw the book at them and find all kinds of charges and cobble them together so that they'll plea to a 'lesser included' is a technique that I think can sometimes be inappropriately used".
"It would condemn the next government to years and years and years of mind-numbing travel and negotiation from one capital after the next to try and cobble together a package which will never satisfy Bill Cash or Liam Fox".
An open question under the USA Freedom Act is whether energetic lawyers for the intelligence agencies will accept the loss of the bulk collection program or seek to cobble together a retention through a patchwork of different legal authorities.
Democrats control the body by a 24-14 margin, but decades-old reforms require them to cobble together a two-thirds supermajority to pass a budget or raise taxes.
In simultaneous elections held in Jharkhand, a state hived off from Bihar in 2000, Congress won nine of the 81 seats and the BJP 30 (though in the end, a Congress ally managed, amid noisy allegations of shady dealing, to cobble together a majority).
However, there are two alternatives: give people money with no strings attached (through a guaranteed basic income, unemployment insurance, disability payments, and so forth), or just make unemployed people survive on whatever miserable scraps they can cobble together.
Her first task will be to cobble together a framework for government that can bridge yawning policy gulfs between two of her three allies one on the far-left and one in the centre (both also led by women).Ms Thorning-Schmidt has already agreed a basic agenda with her primary ally, the Socialist People's Party.
Consumers who want to cobble together different subscriptions from HBO, Netflix and others may find it is not that much cheaper after paying for broadband.Only around 7m homes in America forgo pay-television in favour of an internet-delivered option, compared to 100m that subscribe to it, according to SNL Kagan, a research firm.
But assuming the ruling party can cobble together a majority in the upper house, Mr Abe's prospects of remaining prime minister have just got brighter.
