The best political show in D.C. this week wasn't the IRS hearings, it was the GOP drama playing out sporadically on the Senate floor as four tea party bombthrowers, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Mike (me-too! me-too) Lee faced off against Susan Collins and John McCain over the budget. The four nihilists are blocking the Senate from naming the senators that will go to the budget conference with the House in the way the Senate has always done it, under unanimous consent. They are refusing to allow the conferees to be named unless the Senate votes in advance to bar the negotiators from raising the debt ceiling.
That's an unprecedented demand that set McCain off. Here he is on Thursday schooling Lee on how the Senate works.
"Perhaps the senator from Utah doesn't know about that—the fact that even if they did raise the debt limit, it could not become law because it doesn't go to the president of the United States," McCain said. "So again, maybe the senator from Utah ought to learn a little bit more about how business has been done in the Congress of the United States."
That's pretty representative of how this fight has been playing out all week. It also seems to be spreading in the Senate. Huffington Post has quotes from
a handful of Republican senators who also are not happy with their new colleagues. Lindsey Graham, John Boozman, Jeff Sessions, Thad Cochran and Tom Coburn all expressed varying degrees of disagreement with the tea party tactics. Coburn even suggested that the four are posturing solely at the behest of the House crazies.
"It's all a political game," Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told HuffPost, adding that he supported regular order. "This is a slowdown because the House wants a slowdown. As soon as the House doesn't want the slowdown, it will get released."
Meanwhile, as Greg Sargent
points out, it's hard to see who other than fellow tea partiers in the House these guys are trying to appeal to: They remain out of step in all the polling, even with self-identified Republicans. It's certainly not going to endear these guys to the old bulls of the Senate, like McCain, that they are trying to turn their vaunted institution over to the rabble in the House.
No, the McCains of the Senate only want it to be obstructed and broken their way.