Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean, Jr. (R-21) is turning Zoom-cropped heads in Trenton as the suddenly brilliant political maestro of the moment.

Either that or Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-3) made a phone call and Kean couldn’t help but affirm the suggestion of the South Jersey leader, who’s no political dope.

With just 15 members in a caucus whittled down to near-kindling wood in the Christie years, Kean – while running for Congress under President Donald J. Trump in the 7th District – will have a party platform with which to bash Democrats, who outnumber Republicans by over a million strong in this state, and whose governor has a plus 70% approval rating during the COVID-19 virus.

That’s because Sweeney acquiesced to the GOP’s demand for the senate to create a bipartisan committee to investigate the Murphy Administration’s rresponse to the COVID-19 virus.

In his COVID-19 briefings, and as recently as today, Murphy kept referencing the 911 Commission chaired by former Governor Tom Kean, Sr.

But Junior is evidently the Cardinal Richelieu presence behind Sweeney’s version.

Caucus members are irritated, a source told InsiderNJ, as they watch Kean and company officiallly rescuitated by Sweeney, the duties of their specific committees routed through a bipartisan legislative committee driven by the apparently still-smouldering Senate Prez.

He and Murphy never got along.

It looks, the source opined, like Sweeney’s own crossing of the Rubicon, to keep the energy directed toward weakening Murphy rather than embodying the Democrats’ Murphy-allied senate president, making the choice to assert a coalition of Southern Democrats and otherwise fairly moribund Republicans instead of uniting fractured Dems in the lead-up to 2021.

It’s another case of Democrats dividing themsleves, but this time under the auspices of vengeful politics more than street smart moves-making informed by the likelihood of Murphy occupying the top of the Democratic ticket next year.

And Kean looks like the state’s master Machiavellian as a consequence.