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Inside the Beltway, there has been plenty of gleeful gloating among Democrats that their Republican rivals across the aisle seem to be once again engaged in a messy, public fight that pins the top GOP senator against one of his own. But the reality of this long-building so-called GOP Civil War is far more complicated—and, perhaps, slightly less toxic the

Still, as is typical, the advantage goes to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose sniping with Senator Rick Scott of Florida over whether the GOP really wants to cut Social Security and Medicare is actually about much more than that.

It was Scott who unveiled the partisan 31-page Plan to Rescue America last year while he led the GOP’s official Senate campaign arm. The most politically noxious piece of it was a proposal to sunset—aka end—Social Security and Medicare after five years if Congress doesn’t affirmatively say those programs merit continuation.

“Unfortunately, that was the Scott plan, that’s not a Republican plan,” McConnell told a Kentucky radio program last week after his colleagues booed a central tenet of it. Never one to let something slip, McConnell’s stiff arm of Scott was no accident at a moment when once again Scott’s idea suddenly was cast as GOP orthodoxy and not the brainchild of a super-rich lawmaker musing about fiscal responsibility. McConnell is many things, but driven by ego or emotion is not one of them.

President Joe Biden and his allies have used Scott’s plan to cast Republicans as threats to Social Security and Medicare. Last week, during the State of the Union, Biden slagged Republicans sitting before him without naming Scott, although the White House’s social media feed did so gleefully. In the House chamber, Republicans stood to object to Biden’s characterization of their beliefs and publicly committed not to touch the popular—and expensive—entitlement programe.