That’s been quite out of character for both men. When Cruz arrived in Washington last year, it was assumed he would bring a moderating influence to the Tea Party, or at least serve as a bridge between it and the GOP establishment. Yes, he had run an insurgent campaign in Texas’s Republican primary—beating the establishment choice, poor old David Dewhurst—but, prior to that run, Cruz had spent years comfortably working within that establishment, from his college days at Princeton to Harvard Law School to a Supreme Court clerkship to the Bush administration to the Supreme Court bar. His CV revealed a man who possessed an impressive skill for navigating powerful institutions and, not unrelatedly, ingratiating himself to institutional power. He’d seek out one mentor who’d then introduce him to a new one. Chuck Cooper, the eminent conservative lawyer whose firm once employed a young Cruz, once recalled to me, “Ted had clerked for Rehnquist and I had as well, and before that he’d clerked for Mike Luttig, who’s a very close friend of mine, so it was through them that Ted really came to my attention.” In other words, Cruz had climbed the greasy pole through his relationships.

But since Cruz has gotten to the Senate, he’s done a complete 180. Far from trying to work within the institution and suck up to power, he’s sought to blow up the former and piss off the latter—whether it was his fight over Obamacare that resulted in a government shutdown last fall or, just last month, his use of a procedural maneuver that essentially forced the Senate Republican leadership to vote for a “clean” debt-ceiling increase. Meanwhile, despite the fact that Cruz is the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s vice chairman for grassroots outreach, he’s refused to endorse his Senate colleagues Mitch McConnell, Pat Roberts, and Thad Cochran in their primary fights. In general, Cruz has appeared to go out of his way to tick off the powers that be in the most petty, pointless, and personal manner possible. “They don’t keep Senate records about this kind of thing,” John Dickerson wrote last fall, “but it’s likely that no senator has created as many enemies in his party in as short a time as the junior senator from Texas.”

In other words,Cruz is behaving the way everyone assumed Rand Paul would. Before Paul arrived in the Senate in 2011, he’d spent much of his life being a pain in the ass. As a college student at Baylor who loved to tweak the conservative (and religiously devout) administration; as an ophthalmologist who founded a renegade ophthalmological organization to protest the certification rules of the medical specialty’s long-established professional group; as an insurgent Tea Party candidate who ran against the Kentucky GOP establishment’s (and Mitch McConnell’s) handpicked candidate, Paul was a man who thumbed his nose at institutions and institutional power.

And yet, in the Senate, he’s tried to be a team player—especially when it’s come to his relationship with his fellow Kentucky Senator and Republican leader McConnell, the man he was implicitly running against back in 2010. Before launching his drone filibuster last year, Paul made sure to clear the move with McConnell. Later, he provided McConnell some crucial Tea Party cover back home in Kentucky by not joining Cruz in his shutdown crusade. And, while Cruz has shirked his NRSC duties, Paul, according to an NRSC staffer, routinely shows up to make his fundraising calls for the group; more importantly, he has endorsed McConnell in his primary fight back in Kentucky (albeit maybe not always as wholeheartedly as he could have). All of which has endeared—or, if not endeared, at least made Paul tolerable—to large and unexpected swaths of the GOP establishment. When Mitt Romney hosted a political confab in Park City, Utah, last year, Paul was in attendance. (Cruz was not.) And Paul’s efforts to play nice have even made some of his policy views more palatable to the GOP establishment. Just consider how sentencing reform has become an issue an increasing number of Republicans now embrace.