I think the consensus is that President Obama and the Democrats very much overplayed their collective hand on the sequester, with all of those dire warnings about meet inspection and longer airport lines, but whether or not they think they have a real shot at getting sequestration rolled back — lest its implementation should thwart their “big government is good, but bigger government is better” narrative — they’ve got to keep hammering away at how horrendously damaging these cuts will eventually be (hence, Harry Reid’s shameless groping for some way to connect the cuts to seven Marines’ deaths earlier this week) because, more revenue! Here’s Sen. Rand Paul saying as much in a wide-ranging interview with Cavuto this afternoon:

Well I think the Democrats need to be careful here because they’ve been trying to blame everything – they’ll be blaming the Bubonic Plague on the sequester pretty soon. But Senator Blunt had good amendment today that we passed, and it said “oh why don’t we take some money from here where it’s not necessary and put it into meatpacking inspectors so we inspect our meat.” Because see what the Democrats are doing is they’re saying “oh with the sequester, your meat will be dangerous, we’re going to back to the days before Upton Sinclair.” That hysteria does no one any good. If your country has good leaders, you find where money is being wasted and put it into essential things. …

As Paul goes on to say, there were and are plenty of Republicans proposing ways in which the government could transform the nature of the spending cuts to more efficiently target waste and nonessential services —  but Democrats aren’t really into that, for some odd reason.