'Scott Brown used the Tea Party to get elected,' a tea party leader wrote on his blog. | AP Photos Tea party leader lashes out at Brown

Sen. Scott Brown has thrown his tea party supporters “under the bus” with his recent critiques of some Republican budget cut proposals, a movement leader said Friday.

Brown, a Massachusetts Republican, on Thursday denounced GOP suggestions to cut social and cultural programs as “irresponsible,” and Judson Phillips, a leader of Tea Party Nation, is steamed.


“Brown is a politician, and that is meant in the worst sense of the word politician,” Phillips wrote on his blog. “Scott Brown used the tea party to get elected. Now he no longer needs this movement and we are tossed under the bus.”

In a Thursday floor speech and in a letter to Senate leaders, Brown said that while cuts “reducing and eliminating needless spending and programs are appropriate … a wholesale reduction in spending, without considering economic, cultural, and social impacts is simply irresponsible.”

Republican proposals, he said, “establish the wrong priorities that would disproportionately affect low-income families and seniors.”

Brown has downplayed his connection to the movement, saying in February that he is “a Republican, period” and that while he respects the tea party, he isn’t part of it.

There are vows from Massachusetts tea party members to launch a primary challenge against Brown next year.

Brown’s remarks came just hours after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised the tea party movement in a floor speech. And they hit squarely at the movement that helped get him elected, Phillips said. “In his latest sell out of those who put him in” office, Brown has “repeat[ed] the tired old liberal line that the budget cuts the GOP is pushing, disproportionately hurt ‘low income families and seniors.’”

And Brown’s latest stance is all about winning a full six-year term in 2012, Phillips said.

“He knows self-preservation and self-promotion. He has aligned himself with the RINO crowd, which has no beliefs, other than getting reelected and appeasing whatever base he thinks will help him get reelected. From a crass point of view, that is working.”