An end to the debates in Washington over the proposed bailout of financial institutions on Wall Street is in sight. Leaders in Congress gave an update on the status of the $700 billion economic-rescue package early Sunday evening.

“The era of Wall Street recklessness is over,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said of the bill, which promises more regulation as well as future limits to be imposed upon executive compensation.

Pelosi, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) each spoke in support of the bill that will be presented to the House for a vote sometime Monday.

Now, even some of the more reluctant House Republicans are supporting the rescue plan.

Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.), Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), House Republican Whip, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) gave their support of the revised plan in a press conference Sunday evening.

“When we stood up and blocked the ‘so-called’ deal last week we did so because we thought taxpayers weren’t being protected,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) Sunday evening.  “It’s a bill that does entail risk; taxpayer risk. But I think what you see is we’ve reduced the amount of taxpayer risk in this bill considerably.”

If passed by the House, the bill will then move to the Senate, which will likely consider it Wednesday, after the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah ends.

President Bush lent his support to the revised bill in a press release following the press conference, stating, “I appreciate the leadership shown by Members on both sides of the aisle, who came together to write a very good bill. This bill provides the necessary tools and funding to help protect our economy against a system-wide breakdown.”

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson released a similar statement of support, stating that the bill “provides the necessary tools to deploy up to $700 billion to address the urgent needs in our financial system.”

The bill, which is more than 100 pages long and is called the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,” is meant to resuscitate the U.S. financial system, parts of which have virtually shut down in recent weeks.

The market turbulence has been most evident in events like the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers; the seizure by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. of Washington Mutual, at $307 billion the biggest bank failure in U.S. history, which was then sold at auction to JPMorgan Chase; and the difficulties other banks and investment banks have had.

But what has Congress, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson worried enough to propose a rescue plan in the hundreds of billions of dollars is the action in the credit markets. That’s often less easy to understand and less visible, but in large part, banks are afraid to take risks. So they aren’t lending to each other, and they aren’t lending to people or businesses -- at least not as much as they had.

So, Treasury proposed a plan that would allow the government to buy some of the financial institutions’ most toxic holdings -- up to $700 billion at any one time -- in the hopes that if the worst things are off their books, banks will start lending again and help to unfreeze the economy.

Late Saturday, FOX Business reported that a meeting of some of the key Congressional negotiators was discussing some proposed details of the plan, such as who would oversee it, which financial institutions would be allowed to participate, what limits if any would be placed on executive compensation for companies involved in the rescue and whether homeowners would receive any financial assistance.

A proposed segment of the legislation, which was later scrapped, would have sent 20% of any profits from the rescue plan to an affordable housing fund. Rep. Barney Frank (D, Mass.), in an interview with FOX Business, said he “wouldn’t count on any profits” -- but if there were any, a portion would “go to state and city housing trust funds.”

Some reports have said in recent days that this part of the proposal included money for ACORN, an affordable-housing group that has been under scrutiny for possible voter fraud, but Frank said, “there’s no ACORN funding. That’s a total myth.”

In his weekly radio address, President Bush tried to rally the American people around the legislation, saying, this was “an issue that transcends partisanship.” “If it were possible to let every irresponsible firm on Wall Street fail without affecting you and your family, I would do it. But that is not possible,” he said.

Bush and others are still trying to convince the public to support the plan, but Americans have been reluctant to back a proposal that many see as a bailout of the very people who profited the most from the housing bubble. In addition, with so few real details out about the plan’s components, rumors have been flying and there has been political maneuvering from all sides.

An Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll found that only 30% of respondents supported Bush’s rescue package, with 45% opposed and 25% undecided. The survey was conducted on Thursday and had a margin of error of plus/minus 3.8 percentage points.

Many of the discussions in the past few days have reportedly been heated. Some Congressional Republicans have tried to formulate their own, more free-market-oriented proposal, and the Democrats haven’t appeared to be solidly behind the plan either. The AP said that a major point of disagreement Saturday night was how to include a new government-sponsored program demanded by House Republicans as an alternative to allotting the entire $700 billion toward buying toxic debt from banks and investors.