Tom Corbett and Gary Herbert are frustrated with the lack of progress in Congress. | AP Photos GOP governors to Hill Republicans: Step up

Ask Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and Utah Gov. Gary Herbert what they think of Hill Republicans’ strategy on the sequester, and you get the exact same response: “What strategy?”

It’s a sign that Republican governors might be still giving President Barack Obama a lot of the blame for the sequester — but they're fed up with their own side, too.


Their message for House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders: It’s not OK to just sit on the sidelines. It’s time to do something to stop the automatic cuts, and fast.

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“They need to stop having press conferences and start meeting,” Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell told POLITICO Sunday, referring to both Hill Republicans and Obama. “The time for shows is over. We’ve had 18 months.”

Other governors were even harsher.

“I think there’s a lack of leadership, period. And there’s enough lack of leadership blame to go around,” Herbert said Sunday. “The president needs to step up with his proposals. Speaker Boehner needs to come to the table with his proposals. And what’s happening with [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid? I mean, they haven’t done a budget there for four years.”

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“They all need to step up,” Herbert said. “Whatever the strategy is, it seems to be not too good a one.”

The new rumblings match what's been going on behind the scenes for months. Governors have publicly signed on to letters bashing Obama and praising House Republicans' efforts, but privately their offices have been urging lawmakers to work harder to avoid potentially devastating cuts — particularly those that could hit local programs.

It's a reality check moment for the Republican Party, with state leaders fearing they'll be left to clean up the economic disaster back home if Washington can't overcome its partisan stalemate.

(PHOTOS: What are they saying about sequestration)

Corbett, whose state is one of the top 10 states that could be hit hardest by job losses, says congressional Republicans — and Democrats — need to restart the talks with Obama about how to replace the sequester.

“Frankly, I think the Hill ought to be saying, ‘We’re ready to sit down and work on a budget right now, and we will go through it line by line,’” Corbett said Sunday. “That’s what you’ve got to do. That’s what we do as governors.”

Until now, Republican governors have mostly been content to blame Obama for the sequestration cuts that will hit their states in five days, and they’ve stayed quiet about the role their Hill colleagues have played in the mess. That’s exactly what Republican leaders wanted, since they’re trying to stick Obama with the blame for the cuts, insisting it’s up to him to come up with a backup plan that doesn’t raise taxes again.

( WATCH: Gov. Markell talks sequestration effects on states)

But governors aren’t having it anymore.

McDonnell — who says his state would be hit harder than any of the others, losing 200,000 jobs if the sequester hits — doesn’t even care if Republicans keep fighting Obama’s calls for more tax increases.

“Well, listen, I’m not going to tell them how to do it, but what’s unacceptable is to put half the cuts on the Department of Defense while we’ve got kids in Afghanistan,” McDonnell said. Obama needs to do a lot more on entitlement reform, he said, but “don’t put half of it on defense. Every area is going to have to be cut.”

It’s easy enough for governors to blame all of Congress for lousy leadership, of course. But Hill Republicans need unity in their ranks if they’re going to stick to their message — that it’s up to Obama and the Democrats to propose a sequester replacement plan with no new revenues, since the House already passed a bill by Paul Ryan last year that would have headed it off entirely through spending cuts.

Instead, they’re sharing the blame for what Republican governors see as a broken, crisis-driven city that never actually solves its budget problems.

“I think this city manages from one crisis to the next, and that’s part of the problem,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin told reporters on Friday. “They don’t deal with the bigger issue, the bigger long-term implication. It’s always end of the year, then it’s March 1, then it’s the next thing — that’s inherently what their problem is.”

Democratic governors are urging Obama to stop the sequester too, and they’re likely to deliver that general message to him at the White House Monday. But they’re not pushing him to take revenues off of the table or accept something like the Ryan package of spending cuts, which hit health care programs like Obamacare and Medicaid that are huge Democratic priorities.

In fact, some of them say they have sympathy for Obama. “The president has a sense of urgency, but he’s stuck. Who do you deal with?” Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy said at a POLITICO event Friday. “The speaker can’t cut a deal and take it back to his caucus and sell it.”

It’s not clear what specific direction GOP leaders should take from the Republican governors, since not all of them are ready to give the green light to put revenues on the table.

“My big concern is, don’t make it worse by agreeing to a deal that will take money out of the economy by raising taxes, because I think that would have a devastating impact on the nation’s economy, which would have a negative impact on states,” Walker said.

But one thing Republican governors do want — at a minimum — is more discretion to determine how the cuts will be made. And privately, some want the Department of Defense to have more authority to spread the cuts as painlessly as possible, too.

Corbett, who is facing National Guard furloughs in Pennsylvania when the sequester hits, says he’s going to meet with the state’s congressional delegation on Tuesday to discuss what can be done to give the state more flexibility to achieve the needed savings without furloughs.

“I’m going to object” to the furloughs, Corbett said. “We have enough time that we can give them the savings that they want by not hiring for the vacancies that we have. [But] my understanding is that my adjutant general is being told they can’t do that. They’ve got to furlough.”

Some of the GOP governors have been urging both Obama and the Hill to do more for months. McDonnell has “written multiple letters, and made personal appeals directly, to the president and members of Congress calling for an immediate fix to the sequester,” according to spokesman Jeff Caldwell. In addition, “we have worked closely with Virginia’s congressional delegation to raise awareness of the impacts of sequestration on our economy, and the potential long-term results of this shortsighted policy.”

But for all their frustration with Congress, they’ve been spending more of their time factoring the sequester into their budgets, bracing for the worst, and focusing on working with their legislatures on initiatives they can actually control — like tax and entitlement reforms at the state level, according to Phil Musser, a consultant and former executive director of the Republican Governors Association.

“I think most of them are focusing on what they can control and not what they can’t control,” said Musser.

Now, defense groups and others fighting the cuts are hoping that GOP governors have found their voice — and that governors from both parties will be able to get Obama and Congress back to the table.

"What we're pushing for is collective action," said Dan Stohr, a spokesman for the Aerospace Industries Association. "Hopefully, their collective voices will persuade our elected officials to solve this."

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 6:16 p.m. on February 24, 2013.