One of the most urgent orders of business among the House’s newly dominant Republicans: taking revenge on NPR, an idea that comes straight from the Tea Party base.

House Republicans announced Wednesday they plan to force a floor vote on defunding NPR in response to the firing of analyst Juan Williams last month.

House GOP Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) and Rep. Doug Lamborn (Colo.) said that cutting funds to the publicly subsidized news organization was the winner of the conference’s weekly “YouCut” contest, in which the public votes online on spending items they want eliminated.

“When NPR executives made the decision to unfairly terminate Juan Williams and to then disparage him afterwards, the bias of their organization was exposed,” the two Republicans said in a statement. “Make no mistake, it is not the role of government to tell news organizations how to operate. What is avoidable, however, is providing taxpayer funds to news organizations that promote a partisan point of view. Eliminating taxpayer funding for NPR is precisely the kind of commonsense cut that we have to begin making if we want to fundamentally alter the way business is conducted in Washington.”

Republicans had indicated that they sought to take action against NPR after it dismissed Williams for making controversial remarks about Muslims.

NPR receives only about two percent of its funding from the federal government, which gives you an indication of how dreadfully serious this issue is for the GOP. The weirdest wingnuts are running things.