WASHINGTON — If there is a rock bottom in the frayed relationship between Senate Republicans and Democrats, it seemed uncomfortably close this week as the final days of 2013 on Capitol Hill degenerated into something like an endurance contest to see who could be the most spiteful.
As they headed into their second late-night session of confirmation votes Thursday evening, the Democrats' way of retaliating for Republican delay tactics, senators were chugging Red Bull, sleeping in their offices and angrily assigning blame.
"I think it resembles fourth-graders playing in a sandbox, and I'll give the majority leader, Harry Reid, 99 percent of the responsibility for it," said Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, usually one of the more reserved members.
"He's going to have 'The End of the Senate' written on his tombstone," Alexander said.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, called this week "chaotic and confusing, and a shameful waste of time."
"I am loath to cast partisan blame," he added, before doing just that. "But the plain fact is that there is a faction of the Republican Party that is essentially insisting on burning through all of these time deadlines."
Republicans, furious that Democrats last month stripped away most of their power to filibuster presidential nominations, are using every procedural barricade available to them in the Senate's two-century-old rule book, forcing it to run the clock as long as possible while they vote on a series of President Obama's nominees.
Democrats, hoping to make the situation so unpleasant for their colleagues across the aisle that they eventually break, are scheduling votes at all hours of the day and night. Reid is threatening to refuse to let anyone go home until a backlog of dozens of nominees is gone — even if that means spending Christmas Eve in the Capitol.
Reid has votes planned through Saturday afternoon and will push through another battery of nominations next week, including some that would each require 30 hours of debate, like that of Janet L. Yellen to lead the Federal Reserve.
What members of both parties bemoaned more than anything was not the lack of civility or bipartisan cooperation — which they seem to have given up on long ago — but what they said they see as the irreversible damage inflicted on an institution they claim to revere.
"If Bob Byrd had been here he would have had a stroke," said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican, referring to the late Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the senator whom Republicans and Democrats hold up as the embodiment of senatorial dignity and forbearance.
Some senators expressed concern that this moodier, more intemperate Senate would become the norm now that Democrats have unilaterally changed filibuster rules.
"It's the beginning of what we were worried about," said Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat from West Virginia, among just three Democrats who did not support the rules change. "It's just concerning, very much concerning, where it goes from here."
Mass. delegation turns out for Clark’s swearing-in
WAHINGTON — Democrat Katherine Clark was sworn in Thursday as the newest member of Congress and the fifth woman ever elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts.
Clark, 50, was joined by Representative Richard Neal, Senator Edward J. Markey, and other members of the state's all-Democratic congressional delegation.
Clark easily defeated three opponents in Tuesday's special election. She resigned from her Melrose state Senate seat Thursday. An April 1 date has been set for a special election to fill that seat.
In brief remarks after the swearing-in, Clark thanked her family and vowed to work for the needs of all families in her district and across Massachusetts looking for ''a fair shot at the American Dream.''
''Our families want to be able to find a good job, send their children to great schools, save for college, and count on a secure retirement,'' she said. ''They want to know that the issues they talk about around their kitchen tables will be the same issues on the table here in Congress.''