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Politico reports on the long-awaited vote yesterday in the GOP-controlled U.S. House, on the second relief bill for states affected by Hurricane Sandy:

The House approved nearly $50.6 billion in long-sought emergency aid to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy on Tuesday night, after Northeast lawmakers successfully added tens of billions to bring the package more in line with the White House’s initial request last month…

“While the House bill is not quite as good as the Senate bill, it is certainly close enough,” said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). “We will be urging the Senate to speedily pass the House bill and send it to the president’s desk.”

Near-solid Democratic support in the House was pivotal to the whole strategy, together with Christie and his close ally, Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), working the phones and mining the Republican ranks for precious votes.

NBC News reports on an unsuccessful attempt by none other than arch-conservative Rep. Cory Gardner to persuade fellow Republicans to fund flood mitigation in other states–including Colorado, where the relief is needed after last year’s devastating wildfires.

Earlier Tuesday Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., defended the bipartisan effort by Colorado members to add to the emergency bill $125 million for watershed protection and flood mitigation, including about $20 million for areas in Colorado burned by last summer’s wildfires.

The watershed protection money was in the Sandy bill that the Senate passed last month. The House Rules Committee rebuffed Gardner’s effort Monday night, but he said he hoped Colorado’s two senators will make efforts to add the money when the Senate debates the emergency bill next week.

“The title of the bill is ‘The Disaster Relief Appropriations Act.’ That’s the name of the bill. It’s not the ‘Sandy Disaster Act.’ It’s not the ‘Sandy Relief Act.’ It’s a disaster relief act. New Yorkers weren’t the only ones who had their homes burned down in a devastating natural disaster. We had over 600 in Colorado alone,” Gardner said.

“If we’re going to have disaster assistance for people in this country who truly need it – because we are all in this together — then we shouldn’t just cherry-pick Northeastern United States versus Southwestern United States,” he added.

Rep. Gardner’s frustration over excluding these funds from the bill that passed the yesterday is echoed by Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, in a statement from his office:

“It is extremely disappointing to see the House of Representatives move forward with a bill that does not include critical resources Colorado needs to recover and protect its water supply – resources that were included in the Senate bill that received bipartisan support,” Bennet said. “While eastern states should have the resources they need to recover from the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, this summer, Coloradans also endured devastating disasters – catastrophic wildfires in the midst of one of the worst droughts in decades.”

“It’s frustrating when you hear people talk about how they’re fiscally responsible while they are creating a set of conditions that are inevitably going to cost more money and much more pain. If we don’t deal with these problems now, we could be facing as much as five times the cost to deal with future flooding and damage,” Bennet added.

Bottom line: the vote approved an amount of aid consistent with what affected states asked for, and what the Senate passed last year before the House’s failure to take up that bill killed it. We haven’t seen statements from other Colorado Republican representatives who voted no on the final package yet to know what their objections were–for Gardner, despite the ideological inconsistency this creates, maybe it really was the failure to include this flood assistance.

Unfortunately, that can’t explain the votes of all but a handful of Republicans against the final bill. Rep. Doug Lamborn’s vote against the first Hurricane Sandy relief bill earlier this month on “fiscal responsibility” grounds is likely to be the explanation for most Republican votes yesterday–he just has more company. Either way, Rep. Gardner’s unsuccessful push for more money as most of his party voted against more disaster relief money, like Rep. Lamborn’s hypocritical vote against the earlier bill after seeking additional FEMA assistance of his own during last year’s fire season, seem to exemplify the GOP’s muddled message coming out of this debate.

It is impossible to reckon from their actions what these men stand for at all.

You know, because they have so much leverage and all. FOX 31’s Eli Stokols reports:

“People think this was a big fight over the fiscal cliff,” Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora, told FOX31 Denver Wednesday. “It wasn’t. The big fight is coming up.”

Coffman, like a majority of his House GOP colleagues, voted against the Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 on Tuesday night.

“I don’t think going over the fiscal cliff would have been a huge deal,” he continued. “Temporarily, the markets would have been aggravated until the next Congress could have passed new tax cuts and ironed things out.

“But the real big deal is what’s upon us and going past the debt limit. I have to see a way out of this, real spending cuts, before I vote to raise the debt limit.”

Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, and most House Republicans, are in the same boat, promising not to raise the $16.4 trillion debt ceiling until they can force Obama to agree to deep spending cuts for entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.

It’s easy to see, given the intransigence from Republicans over even the reduced scale two-month deal passed this week, why President Barack Obama wanted to get a much larger “grand bargain” for the purpose of getting past this agonizing and mostly unproductive debate. Now, the country faces another manufactured fiscal crisis in only two month’s time–and although the administration was able to stave off Medicare and Social Security cuts this time, there’s potentially less negotiating leverage now to do that again.

The upshot in this for Democrats, of course, is the continuing and overwhelming public opposition to making cuts to Social Security and Medicare. After all the drama of the last few weeks, it’s going to come as a rude shock to many Americans two months from now when they discover that Republicans are once again trying to cut these popular institutions. As we’ve said repeatedly, the zeal to do so, and the unvarnished way the demands for cuts to Medicare and Social Security are made by today’s GOP, make very little political sense to us.

Likewise, we’re hearing more grumbling from the left about Sen. Michael Bennet’s very splashy vote against the “fiscal cliff” compromise, one of only eight Senators (and three Democrats) to do so. It’s worth noting, as we did, that liberal Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa also voted against the bill, but for objections he very clearly articulated regarding the higher limit on income remaining covered by the Bush tax cuts. Nobody disputes that Harkin voted “no” because he thought this was a bad deal for the middle class. And nobody’s really dwelling on Harkin’s vote.

Not so for Bennet, whose “no” vote has received a great deal of press attention. Part of that is because of his status as incoming head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, but in Bennet’s statement and subsequent interviews, he has given no indication why he opposed the deal other than it “does not put in place a real process to reduce the debt.”

As a number of local press stories have pointed out today, that’s what the GOP says too.

The lack of nuance, or even some lip service to the idea of preserving popular institutions in the context of “reducing the debt,” probably do call for a fuller explanation of where Bennet stands. Knowing what we know about Bennet, we think he can explain this vote in a way that assuages liberal Democrats, and reaffirms the party’s message on the recent battle. In the absence of that, however, Bennet arguably muddies an otherwise clear distinction, and gives the GOP a bit of at least rhetorical comfort. The head of the DSCC can and should make his point better.