Ho ho, Ted Cruz, you impetuous scamp! Since today is a day of the week, you must have pissed off someone with some sassy backtalk. Who had the “Dianne Feinstein” square for today’s game of “Ted Cruz Mansplains Until _____ Wants to Punch Him in His Cock” bingo?

"Let me just make a couple of points in response," Feinstein countered at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. "One, I'm not a sixth grader. Senator, I've been on this committee for 20 years. I was a mayor for nine years. I walked in, I saw people shot. I've looked at bodies that have been shot with these weapons. I've seen the bullets that implode. In Sandy Hook, youngsters were dismembered…It's fine you want to lecture me on the constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I've been here for a long time. I've passed on a number of bills. I've studied the constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for the lecture.

At issue was DiFi’s bill to bring back the Clinton-era assault weapons ban, which passed the Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote of 10-8 and now, as your Wonkette has noted, will go to the Senate to die in a filibuster. But the exchange between Cruz and Feinstein highlights a larger issue with the junior senator from Texas that has members of his own conference grumbling:

The new senator reportedly just can’t stop running his mouth in meetings, leading to much anonymous grumbling by colleagues. As one Republican member huffed to Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, Cruz is “Jim DeMint without the charm.”

Meow! While other newbie senators generally put their heads down and get some actual work done, Cruz has spent his first two months in Congress’s august upper chamber calling out all the commies on the faculty at Harvard Law School, suggesting that SecDef nominee Chuck Hagel might have taken money from North Korea, and threatening to shut down the federal government if Obamacare is not defunded. All of this bomb throwing has endeared him to the fevered nose-pickers on the right, who love nothing more than a sophisticated political debate of “I know you are but what am I?”

The irony, as Tina Brown’s Mausoleum of Journamalism points out, is that Cruz was long an establishment guy through and through. A Princeton grad who edited the Harvard Law Review, he did legal work for the Bush campaign during the recount in 2000 and then served in the administration at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department, and his Senate campaign last year was chaired by Ed Meese, who is apparently still alive and sentient. Mark McKinnon called Cruz “the Republican Barack Obama,” though to be fair McKinnon is an unreconstructed hack and centrist circle jerker who founded No Labels and spends his weekends softly holding Thomas Friedman and assuring him that there will soon be a Grand Bargain and then unicorns and magic fairy dust shall rain down across the land.

Then he discovered that the way to the party base’s heart was to act like an unreconstructed asshole, and now the Senate is stuck with him for at least the next six years. Which should give DiFi plenty of time to regret apologizing for snapping at him.

[TPM / Daily Beast]