When U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk was sworn into the U.S. Senate last month, he promised his new constituents that he would support common-sense bipartisan legislation in Washington. He's not off to a very good start.

This week, the North Shore Republican joined his colleagues in filibustering a defense authorization bill that included an amendment to repeal the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. He also voted to obstruct a bill that would provide medical care to 9/11 rescue workers who became ill after inhaling toxic fumes and smoke maneuvering around Ground Zero. (The New York Times called it "one of the most shameful days in the modern history of the Senate.") Here's his rationale, via WBEZ:

“The Senate’s top priority should be to prevent a large tax increase from hitting families and small business employers on January 1st,” Kirk said. “I promised the people of Illinois that job one would be jobs. I support the president’s proposal and will vote today to ensure the bipartisan tax bill takes precedence before considering non-economic legislation, including items I support like the 9/11 victims health bill.”

This is political nonsense, plain and simple. The Senate started debating the tax cut deal yesterday. Does Kirk really expect us to believe that the "world's greatest deliberative body" can't take up two pieces of legislation simultaneously? By promising to block these highly popular measures until the upper chamber approves an extension of all Bush-era tax cuts, and thus endangering their passage, he's basically holding first responders and gay soldiers hostage until he can pass along $120 billion in subsidies to the hyper-rich. It's an absurd use of the Senate's ridiculous procedural rules. And Edward McClellan is right to note that the DADT repeal chicanery "didn’t represent Illinois’s tradition of tolerance and extending rights to groups discriminated against in less enlightened corners of the country."

Kirk formally announced his opposition to the DREAM Act too, which passed the House but which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has tabled in order to build more support. Perhaps the fiscal conservative missed this memo from the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates that the immigration bill would actually reduce the nation's deficit by $1.4 billion over the next decade by adding more authorized workers to the nation's payroll.

On the tax cut front, four Illinois Democrats -- U.S. Reps. Danny Davis, Jesse Jackson Jr., Jan Schakowsky, and Luis Gutierrez -- joined 50 other representatives in signing a letter opposing the White House deal, which the progressives described as "fiscally irresponsible" and "grossly unfair." We outlined their major objections yesterday. According to TPM's Brian Beutler "a broad canvas of House and Senate aides, both Democrats and Republicans, suggests that nobody -- not in the House leadership, not in the rank and file, not in the Senate -- has any idea what the consequences of this gambit will be." This should make for an interesting few days in the nation's capitol.