Republicans spent years demanding that the Senate pass a budget. Earlier this year they did, and now a handful of Tea Party senators — including Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) — are preventing the Senate from doing what it should do next, go into conference with the House to come up with a budget. They’re afraid that if an actual budget comes out of that conference, it could be passed with a simple majority vote.

Basically, they’re demanding that 60-vote supermajority Senate Republicans decided to create when President Obama was elected, to make it more likely that American default on its debt — a disaster that would would make 2008’s financial crisis seem like a bad weekend in Vegas.

Why are these Republicans so scared? Cruz explained today: He doesn’t trust his fellow Republicans.

But he should really be more worried about his buddy Senator Paul who keeps using bad math, even though he’s been corrected.

Paul and Cruz have earned the ire of John McCain (R-AZ) before. You may remember he called them “wacko birds.”

But yesterday, McCain felt the need to explain to these senators how Congress worked before the Tea Party decided sabotage was a strategy.

Of course, the best irony of all is there would likely be no “wacko birds” in the Senate today if John McCain hadn’t made their hero Sarah Palin his VP choice.