So Elizabeth Warren starts quoting from a 30-year-old letter attacking Jeff Sessions on the Senate floor and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell uses a Senate rule to silence her and remove her from the debate on Sessions’s nomination. It was initially unclear what provoked the outrage that greeted his move—was it that Warren was being ordered by Senate procedure not to participate, or was it that the letter was by the late Coretta Scott King? Nonetheless, outrage there was. And Warren fueled it and abetted it and stoked it, as is her right and indeed entirely in her political interest.

To which Republicans and conservatives who view Warren either with distaste or fear or contempt responded in two ways. 1) They made reference to her ridiculous claim decades ago of Native American parentage, which is the inevitable go-to when trying to dismiss her. To which I say, why not. She lied and did something for which she deserves to be remembered scornfully, not that it matters to anyone but those who have already had a good laugh at the term Fauxcahontas. 2) They said this was a canny Machiavellian move by McConnell and other Republicans to help position Warren as a key Democratic leader and give her a leg up in 2020.

Now, if the second claim is true, I would only note that recent history offers a deafening cautionary note to anyone who believes he would be wise trying to play a role in helping an ideological and partisan rival emerge victorious atop the other party’s greasy pole because the rival would be the easiest of foes to beat. It could be true that this is what McConnell and others are thinking. If so, they should stop thinking it, as it is deeply stupid. There’s no way of knowing what might happen in a few years, and no way of knowing whether Warren or any other Democrat might be able to thread a needle the way Donald Trump did in 2016 to knock him off the presidential pedestal in 2020.

More important, though, was the gut, almost autonomic response of the Republican and conservative body politic: McConnell attacks Warren, Warren is bad, McConnell move must be good.

Sorry. The McConnell move wasn’t good, and deserves no defense. Perhaps McConnell wanted to put Democrats on notice that he wasn’t a nice guy and was willing to be a jerk the way his Democratic predecessor, Harry Reid, was a jerk and he didn’t care who knew it. Fine, but it doesn’t make him any less of a jerk for doing it. After all, McConnell didn’t invoke the rule in question when Ted Cruz, a man in his own party, called him a liar on the Senate floor—apparently on the grounds he didn’t want to make Cruz a martyr. Well, he just made Warren a martyr, and even if it was in the Machiavellian wish to help make her the 2020 nominee, it makes him and the GOP and the Senate look lousy.

It is bullying to say Warren couldn’t quote the Coretta Scott King letter on the grounds that it violates Senatorial courtesy since Sessions was still a member of the Senate when she said it. So she would be allowed to talk trash about other people but not about another senator? Who died and made other senators more deserving of politesse than, say, everybody else in America? Why, because in the 19th Century some guy hit another guy with a stick on the Senate floor, so in 2017 McConnell gets to tape Elizabeth Warren’s mouth shut?

And why didn’t McConnell keep kicking senators out of the debate when a few Democrats followed Warren’s example and read the King letter later after her censure? He didn’t because it would have made him look silly, like an umpire throwing every single person complaining about a call out of the game. Whatever happened here was far more energizing to McConnell’s Democratic rivals than it was just thrilling and rallying for Republicans. McConnell should have considered that possibility before he started.