And like the sniveling little rat that he is, Reid bashed Cruz while he was not on the Senate floor to defend himself.

Via Politico:

On Day Three of a partial government shutdown, the Senate got off to a snippy start as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid elevated Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) as the new “joint speaker” of the House of Representatives.

Reid, a Nevada Democrat, was referring to the Republican-led House’s new tactic of passing piecemeal funding bills to fund agencies such as the National Institutes of Health.

The House leadership “is following Cruz’s idea specifically,” Reid said. “Sen. Cruz is now joint speaker. He lectures the House on occasion, as he does people over here.”

“We’re not going to give a blank check to the junior senator from Texas to pick his favorite person in government on a daily basis. Today it’s the parks. Tomorrow it’s NIH. Maybe later it will be something else,” Reid continued.

That prompted a terse exchange between Reid and top Senate Republicans Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of Texas.

“With all due respect to my good friend, the majority leader, he was speaking about the junior senator from Texas, who I don’t see on the floor here at the moment,” McConnell said.

Cornyn, Cruz’s home-state colleague, said that by Reid criticizing Cruz while he was not around on the floor and able to defend himself, the spirit of Senate decorum was in “jeopardy of being transgressed.”