In a stunning turn of political events, Republicans in the U.S. Senate have made Sen. Elizabeth Warren the face of the Democrat Party.

That is an accomplishment that almost equals the status of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, the “Lion of the Senate,” whose seat Warren occupies.

Kennedy was a lot of things, including being a solid liberal. Unlike Warren, though, he was more than just talk. He got things done in the Senate and for his state. But he never stirred the passions of the true believers of the lunatic left the way Warren has.

The Warren development came about when the Republican-controlled Senate, at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s behest, brought up a little-used rule to silence Warren from further attacking fellow Sen. Jeff Sessions and his nomination for attorney general.

McConnell did what nobody else has been able to do. He stopped her from talking — at least on the Senate floor.

The Senate confirmed the nomination, as expected, anyway. But this did not take place until after Warren was ruled in violation of Senate rules impugning the motives of a fellow senator. Warren read a 30-year-old letter by Kennedy, who called Sessions a “disgrace” when Sessions was turned down for a federal judgeship in 1986.

Ordinarily, Warren’s vitriolic speech would have gone unnoticed. She is an attack politician, and insults readily fall from her lips, and they are usually ignored, except of course by her admirers on the hard left. But when McConnell shut Warren down he turned Warren into a martyr and increased her credibility among Democrats looking for a leader after the debacle of the 2016 election.

Right off the bat there was talk of Warren, who is up for re-election in 2018, now being the leading Democrat candidate for president in 2020.

And why not? The only question is whether McConnell targeted Warren out of pique, or whether the old fox planned to thrust Warren to the forefront, boost her presidential possibilities, and stir up trouble for the Democrats. Surely the Republicans would love to run against Warren for president in 2020.

Democrat Party politics are changing and going hard left. The party is becoming a cult. Not only have the Democrats in Washington become the party of obstruction; they have become the party of the Occupy Movement, using the same disruptive tactics. Occupy Wall Street has become Occupy Washington.

And one of the founders of the Occupy Movement is none other than Elizabeth Warren.

“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” she said of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. “I support what they do.”

And what they do is disrupt things, the way anarchists do.

Only unlike the unkempt and hungry demonstrators of Occupy Wall Street, who commandeered public space for their antics, the members of Occupy Washington, all Democrats, are well dressed, well paid and well fed. And they already work in the public space they occupy, the chambers of the U.S. House and Senate.

All you have to do is witness the tactics of the Democrats in the House. Rather than play by the rules, the Democrats, like the protesters of Occupy Wall Street, or Occupy Boston, staged a sit-in, occupying the floor of the U.S. House in June to protest delays in debating gun legislation.

Along the same lines, some 70 Democrat members of the House, or one third of all Democrat members, insulted President Trump when they boycotted his inaugural on the grounds that Trump was not a “legitimate” president.

The Democrats in the Senate, meanwhile, opposed and obstructed all of Trump’s Cabinet nominations. They boycotted confirmation hearings. They forced all-night Senate sessions. And they did not have the votes to veto any of them.

This is not the work of a loyal opposition but the work of obstructionists determined to damage Trump’s ability to govern, no matter the damage to the country.

If nothing else, the Democrat Party, acting as Occupy Washington, has also given the green light to small and large anti-Trump demonstrations that tend to attract anarchists, now dressed in black, bent on tearing the system down.

“We tried to warn you,” David Graeber, an American anthropologist who is credited with organizing Occupy Wall Street, told The New York Times.

Graeber said the movement’s in-your-face tactics, which Warren uses, was successful in elevating income inequality to the top of the Democrat political agenda.

And income inequality is one of Warren’s main issues.

In your face? Beware.

Donald Trump invented it.

luke1825@aol.com.