Last night, 17 Republican senators voted to advanced a currently unwritten “infrastructure” deal totaling over $1 trillion. That came after months of those same GOP members getting bamboozled by Democrats, and even Joe Biden himself in all his senility, to the point where it simply boggles the mind that they didn’t walk away from negotiations.

But what’s done is done. The bill will now be put into print, no doubt totaling thousands of unaccountable pages of special-interest spending, and those same 17 Republicans will vote for its final passage. Joe Biden will be handed his “bipartisan” achievement and all the credit along with it.

In other words, Republicans have fully embraced being the “stupid party.” Here’s the list of names if you haven’t seen it yet.

67-32 vote. 17 Republican Senators voting YES: Blunt, Burr, Capito, Cassidy, Collins, Cramer, Crapo, Graham, Grassley, Hoeven, McConnell, Murkowski, Portman, Risch, Romney, Tillis, Young

— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) July 28, 2021

So much for Lindsey Graham 2.0. Instead of leaning into being an actual conservative, a role he chose to play the last few years of Trump’s presidency, he’s now decided that partnering up with his old buddy Joe Biden is just a brilliant move. What could possibly go wrong, right?

But what’s so remarkable here isn’t that more moderate Republicans would spit in the face of their voters. The GOP base has come to expect that. Rather, it’s the fact that they did so while Democrats were announcing to the world that they were going to pass a massive reconciliation bill anyway. Not a single one of these Republicans has bothered to explain how they plan to stop the reconciliation bill, because if they can’t, then this infrastructure deal is utterly pointless and politically idiotic. They made a deal with people who are literally promising to screw them over. The mind boggles.

Further, note how many of those same 17 Republicans opposed the push to send $2,000 checks directly to Americans last year, with the claim being we couldn’t afford it. Well, that would have cost less money than this infrastructure package they are now eagerly voting for, and it would have certainly been more accountable in regards to how the money is spent. Instead of doing the smart thing politically, knowing the entire time that Democrats were going to pass stimulus checks anyway a few months later, Republicans punted and ceded a major issue to the left. While that may or may not have cost the GOP the Senate, it certainly wasn’t a non-factor either.

What’s the calculation now? That these senators bring home enough bacon to solidify their support in their own states? Several of these Republicans are actually retiring, making their decisions all the more puzzling if you operate from the assumption they are conservative. Admittedly, that is probably supposing too much.

Mitt Romney can’t go around talking about fiscal responsibility while rubber-stamping a massive spending bill for Joe Biden. Well, I suppose he can, but he’s proving his critics right in the process, and that’s really the theme here. Republicans are often accused of caring about corporations more than normal people. How does passing this infrastructure deal not play right into that stereotype? Republicans won’t spend money to help individual Americans, even to help themselves politically, but they’ll burn their own credibility to spend a trillion dollars on corporate giveaways. They might as well be handing over a signed confession to their most ardent detractors.

I guess the only real question left is will GOP voters care enough to punish them?