The Senate majority leader and minority leader have been giving each other the Capitol Hill equivalent of the silent treatment ever since they sat down for a routine meeting in late November, according to Politico.
McConnell reportedly told Reid that he had sandbagged several sections of a crucial transportation bill, and Reid “left the meeting seething with rage.” Since then, McConnell has proceeded to badmouth Reid behind closed doors. Now, they “can hardly stand the sight of each other.... Though Reid and McConnell have communicated through aides and occasionally with each other on the floor, they’ve done so with gritted teeth.”
Speaking of teeth: Reid’s family was so poor that it “didn’t even own toothbrushes,” Burgess Everett writes, contrasting the minority leader’s distaste for “Capitol Hill’s country club culture” with McConnell’s hobnobbing at fundraisers—a hotbed of halitosis, if ever there was one.