Seasoned, moderate Republicans are sparring publicly with their junior, far right colleagues, bringing the party’s internal disputes to the Senate floor and adding a new layer of partisanship to an already gridlocked chamber.
The budget debate incited divisive intra-party squabbling as Tea Party senators looked to obstruct ordinary budget processes last week.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain sparred with freshmen Republicans demands on a potential conference between the House and Senate to reconcile the two chambers’ disparate budget proposals.
Four Tea Party-backed junior senators—Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Mike Lee of Utah, and Marco Rubio of Florida—have demanded a promise that any delegation wouldn’t agree to raising the debt ceiling as part of such a conference, blocking the Senate’s attempt to appoint conferees which is done by unanimous vote.
The demand of a condition “that happens to be important to a small group…will paralyze the process,” McCain said. “Obviously you can predict the outcome.”
He criticized Lee for characterizing such a conference as a back-room, closed-door deal, reminding him that any deal struck would have to be voted on by the chambers.
“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,” he said angrily.
Below, watch the C-SPAN video edited by Talking Points Memo.
On Wednesday, McCain and Cruz butted heads again on the budget after McCain criticized Cruz for not trusting his party to act responsibly. Cruz doubled down on the criticism.
“Let me be clear: I don’t trust the Republicans. And I don’t trust the Democrats,” Cruz said.
The last few years’ wave of Tea Party candidates campaigned on their plan to shake up Washington and ignore party loyalties and business-as-usual.
“We were not sent here to affirm the way the Senate worked as Congress racked up trillions in debt, inflated the housing bubble, doled out favors to special interests, squeezed the middle class and trapped the poor in poverty,” Lee said on the senate floor. “We were sent here to change that.”
Many GOP senators told Huffington Post they understood the senators’ concerns, but rejected their tactics.
South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham said he trusted “the normal course of business–that we’re not going to use reconciliation to raise the debt limit,” and Alabama deficit hawk Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Budget committee, told Huffington Post that “eventually we need to go forward and reach an agreement, the president needs to be engaged, and a conference provides an opportunity to do that.”
But Cruz sees himself as a crusader.
“I will suggest to my friend from Arizona, there may be more wacko birds in the Senate than is suspected,” the Texas senator said Thursday, referring to the pejorative name McCain gave him, Paul, and Rep. Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, earlier this year during the filibuster led by Paul over drones.
Jane Timm