Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) tweets that when a few Republicans supply the marginal votes for increased spending by Democrats, it starts to make the Republican Party irrelevant.

What Sen. Lee explains in the above tweet is very important. The Republican Party is a political party that supposedly holds to certain planks of an overall platform, principles such as fiscal responsibility. When enough elected members of a party abandon the spirit of where the party is on an issue, enough members to get legislation across pass/fail thresholds, it erodes that party's political capital and renders it useless in the deliberative check-and-balance process. "Over and over again," to return to Sen. Lee's tweet, takes the problem a step further. A one-off vote is one thing, but repeated votes by handfuls of lawmakers against the general spirit of the party pile legislative loss upon legislative loss. It cuts against the party, and it cuts against what the party should be attempting to accomplish.