On the Senate floor this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and some Senate Democrats took a few moments out of what I’m sure is a very — er — busy schedule to excoriate Mitt Romney over his positively diabolical personal tax secrecy (probably because of all that greedy, dodgy, loophole-and-foreign-bank-account scheming he did to totally avoid paying taxes, the nerve of that man) and his apparently nefarious plot to use his potential presidency in order to basically just cut checks to his millionaire buddies. So, nothing too out of the ordinary for Reid — it’s not like we’re hearing any of this for the first time.

If you’re a multimillionaire, Mitt Romney won’t rest until you get a quarter million dollar tax cut. That’s what the Ryan budget does. And Romney likes that. For all we know, Mitt Romney could be one of those who have paid no federal income tax. Thousands of families make more than $1 million, pay nothing in federal income taxes each year. Repeat that Madame President, thousands of families making more than a million dollars a year pay nothing in federal income taxes. Is Mitt Romney among those? We’ll never know since he refuses to release his tax returns for the years before he was running for president.

I mean, it’s actually really generous of him to give his time to help escalate the character-and-class warmongering against Mitt Romney like that, you know? It really shows that he’s a team player for the Democrats and Barack Ob– wait, what? Our elected, public officials… aren’t supposed to use official Congressional time and resources, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, in order to campaign for/against other political candidates? You mean the Senate floor isn’t meant to be used that way? …Oops. From The Hill:

Republicans say Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) flouted the spirit of ethical prohibitions against political activity on federal property Wednesday after he ripped Mitt Romney on the Senate floor. …

“He’s campaigning on the Senate floor. It’s the taxpayer-funded Senate floor. The speech had nothing to do with the Senate. It was a pure campaign speech. You couldn’t give it in the rotunda. You couldn’t give it in my office. It’s a taxpayer-funded building,” said a senior Senate Republican aide.

Reid has long relished his role as an attack dog, using the Senate floor this year to criticize Romney. …

“The things Reid says on the Senate floor ha[ve] nothing to do with governance,” said another GOP aide. “It’s what you would hear at a political rally. He would go into a convent and crush Romney if he thought he had to.” …

Of course, you can make the arguments that Republicans get to spend plenty of time bashing President Obama (but, key word: President), and that this really is a legitimate policy issue as President Obama tries his darndest to get Congress to re-up the Bush-era tax rates for only those families making less than 250k a year, which is the argument that Reid’s office seemed to take in response to the finger-pointing. Still, that round of discussion seemed oddly designed to merely showcase some furious reactions to Mitt Romney’s 47-percent comments, rather than related to any legislation at hand. Maybe not technical rule-breaking, but still, there is a line in there somewhere, and I’d personally rather we be more careful about toeing it than less. (Heh, Harry Reid, less-than-judicious with tax dollars? Mind = blown.)