Tea party Republicans want deeper cuts.

From the beginning, it was obvious that the plan under the Budget Control Act to get a bipartisan super-committee to come up with balanced cuts in spending for defense and social programs wasn't going to work. And it didn't. Committee members just could not agree. It was also obvious that the agreed-in-advance "punishment" for not coming up with the cuts, the sequestering of $1.2 trillion in more or less equal amounts from each spending category, wasn't going to work. And it didn't.

Thus, we have the House Republican leadership's "Sequester Replacement Act." That, as Joan McCarter has explained, is:



[...] the Republicans' vision for the country that would, literally, make the poor go hungry to give the Pentagon more money that it has asked for. It would also eliminate Social Services Block Grants that provide funding for Meals on Wheels, day care for children and disabled adults, adoption assistance, and transportation for the elderly and disabled.

The House is expected to vote on that today. And, even though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has made clear that the replacement act will be dead-on-arrival in the Senate, it's expected to pass the House anyway.

But not without some gripes from tea party Republicans who are unhappy the leadership has reneged on the deal they cut last August that set out the supposedly guaranteed across-the-board cuts in exchange for raising the federal debt ceiling. It doesn't matter to them that deeper cuts in social spending are being proposed so that the Pentagon doesn't get hit with the budget ax:



Several conservatives who opposed the 2011 debt-limit hike say they will likely support the legislation Thursday, but they first delivered a bitter message to their party’s leadership: We told you so. “It’s a façade. I mean, come on,” freshman Rep. Jeff Landry (R-La.) said Wednesday during a press briefing with other House conservatives. “This is a smoke screen to protect people who voted to raise the debt ceiling.

Tea party-backed Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) and Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) also chimed in with head-shaking assessments. “It’s like a whole shell game around this town," Huelskamp told The Hill. “This potentially puts us down that road of not delivering what we promised.”

But these tea partiers are going to go along with this vote. So all their supposedly principled objections count for nothing more than petty kvetching about a bill that will make its last gasp the instant it's delivered to the Senate. Even the most avid devotees of Washington Kabuki should be embarrassed by that.

•••

Bill passed 218-199.