We supported the original Boehner Plan last week, but the agreement with the Senate has made it much worse. Cuts in defense have become an unacceptably large portion of its savings, $350 billion in the first “tranche” and then as much as $500 billion more in the second.

The second round of cuts could be particularly egregious. After the initial $900 billion agreed-upon cuts in the first tranche, the bill establishes a bipartisan “super-committee” to identify another $1.5 trillion in cuts. If Congress does not enact those cuts, there will be automatic reductions split evenly between security and non-security spending.

But the super-committee is almost guaranteed to fail, for the same reasons that months of wrangling have not led to a grand bargain with explicit terms today: The parties’ positions are too far apart. We should assume, then, that the automatic cuts are likely to become law.

That does not mean that they will happen. Future Congresses will have their say, and it is hard to believe that they will accept a ten-year budget path set now. This bill will, however, establish the default settings for federal spending. Liberals who want more domestic discretionary spending will have to get legislation through both chambers of Congress and past the president’s desk. So too for conservatives who want to restore defense spending.

If the automatic cuts become law, restoring defense spending is exactly what we hope Republicans try to do. The cuts are deep, and the politically easiest places to make savings will be in end strength, procurement, and training.

We would prefer not to put these defense cuts into law in the first place, and therefore not to take the risk that these efforts at restoration will fail. But we understand the pressure on Republican congressmen to vote for this deal today. They do not want an adverse reaction from the markets, they do not want to disrupt the necessary operations of the federal government, and they do not want blame for either to make it easier for President Obama to win reelection. All of these are legitimate considerations.

The right thing to do now would be to pass a short-term extension of federal borrowing authority to negotiate a better deal, one that does not place defense at such risk. We were never fans of the idea of a special committee, even in the original Boehner Plan. It’d be much better to kill it and the automatic cuts backstopping it, and settle for the enforceable caps that achieve the first $900 billion in savings.

If such revisions are impossible, then the deal should be accepted — under duress, without enthusiasm, and with a firm resolve to correct its deficiencies at the first opportunity.