Rand Paul didn’t “grandstand” last week, but the Republican Party has been doing it for a decade

When Rand Paul held up the Republicans’ monstrous spending bill last Thursday with a mini-filibuster on the Senate floor, an anonymous GOP Senate aide told The Hill, “He’s all about grandstanding.” Most Republican senators (except Mike Lee) appeared to believe pretty much the same thing: that Paul was needlessly holding up regular congressional business in the face of another government shutdown purely in the name of self-promotion.