A Republican attempt to repeal the estate tax is expected to fail in the Senate today, but supporters of the measure will turn their attention to compromise plans being proposed by two senators.

“I don’t think that a repeal is going to pass as quickly or even at all. The 60 votes just aren’t there to do it,” a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the executive director of its Continuity of Government Commission, John Fortier, said. “A compromise won’t come anytime soon, but at the end of the day, I expect us to end up with one.”

Senator Baucus, a Democrat of Montana, is suggesting setting an exemption level of $7 million a couple with a graduated tax rate of 15%, 25%, and, for estate values in excess of $20 million a couple, 35%.

Speaking just before Mr. Baucus on the Senate floor yesterday, Senator Kyl, a Republican of Arizona, emphasized his plan, circulating around the halls of Congress for a few weeks, to provide couples with a $10 million exemption and to tax only 15% above that amount.

Both plans could empty the government’s coffers substantially, but still cost less than the full repeal of the estate tax, which President Bush has supported. Mr. Kyl’s blueprint for tax reform would cost 84% as much as a full repeal of the estate tax, or $650 billion during the decade from 2012 to 2021, while Mr. Baucus’s proposal depletes revenue by 74%, or between $500 billion and $600 billion in that period, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Either method is seen as a way to pull the two sides out of a political quagmire. Last fall, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans caused several senators to delay the vote after labeling the repeal “unseemly.”

Mr. Bush’s call for a permanent elimination of the estate tax, now at 55% for those who leave more than $2 million in an estate and couples who leave more than $4 million, would reduce tax revenue by $800 billion – $1 trillion with lost interest savings, according to economists.

But the prospect of such a drastic cut left many on the Senate floor yesterday anxious about the implications of the move.

“The federal financial situation will only get worse over the next 13 years. This is beyond fiscal responsibility; this is fiscal insanity,” Senator Dayton, a Democrat of Minnesota, said. “We’re on the deck of the Titanic looking out and seeing the financial iceberg ahead, while the Republicans fuel the fire to head for it and the super-rich get to enjoy the champagne and caviar for a little while longer.”

Both sides illustrated their argument with charts to convince fellow senators both how much and how little repeal of the estate tax would affect the American public, as well as with personal stories of the tax’s burden on the low-earning working man, and its equal damage to the small business owner.

Mr. Kyl told of a small printing business in Arizona sold to a corporation because the family could not pay the estate tax after the company’s founder died, thus resulting in the termination of 200 employees and the cessation of the family’s extensive community investment. Mr. Baucus and Senator Cornyn of Texas cited similar incidents related to the loss of family farms and other small agricultural businesses when the IRS called after the death of a business owner.

“The estate tax discourages savings, small business owners, families, and farms from saving and reinvesting in business and hinders their ability to operate from generation to generation. We’re all familiar with sons and daughters selling the family farm,” Mr. Cornyn said. “The IRS interacts with Americans almost every day in one way or another. It should not be there on the day those Americans die.”

Other senators brought out diagrams to show the amount of money the federal government will save the mere .5% of Americans they say will benefit from the repeal. Senator Lautenberg, a Democrat of New Jersey, displayed a placard showing that Vice President Cheney would receive a cut of $12 million, Paris Hilton $14 million, and a former Exxon CEO, Lee Raymond, $164 million. “It’s obscene,” Mr. Lautenberg said.

In the long run, many groups, including the CATO Institute, have found that in reforming the estate tax, increasing the exemption level makes more sense than cutting the tax rate, or the tax entirely, so the compromises could make headway among contentious senators, the director of Tax Policy Studies at the CATO Institute, Chris Edwards, said.

“Not a lot of big corporations have been pushing for a repeal, but small businesses for two reasons: The estate tax probably doesn’t raise any money for the government now – the amount it brings in costs as much as the paperwork to process it – and it causes long-term damage to the economy,” he said. “A full repeal has no chance, but unless a compromise is reached, business owners are going to find a way to hide their money, or not going to find ways to build business.”