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That is when Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky took to the Senate floor to deride Mr. McCain's opposition to his measure that would punish Egypt as "spurious and really, frankly, absurd," not the first time Mr. Paul has wielded verbal scythes toward his colleagues.

The willingness of Republicans to skewer one of their own became increasingly apparent on Friday as more and more members of the party peeled away from Mr. Hagel, President Obama's nominee for secretary of defense, saying they would not vote to confirm him after Mr. Hagel melted like chocolate on a dashboard under combative questioning from Republicans.

Still, Republican senators and aides said that despite a halting performance, Mr. Hagel would probably be confirmed with Democratic votes. A filibuster of his nomination is still possible, a likely first for a cabinet nominee. Aides to Senators John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican, and Ted Cruz, a Texas newcomer, said Friday that they had not ruled out procedural roadblocks to stop Mr. Hagel's nomination.

But Republican Senate aides say Democrats would probably be able to muster 60 votes to move to a final, up-or-down tally.

"For a cabinet office, I think 51 votes is generally considered the right standard for the Senate to set, and at that level, I think he makes it," Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership, said Friday on Fox News, even as he announced his opposition to Mr. Hagel.

The White House shared that view.

"I would be stunned if, in the end, Republican senators chose to try to block the nomination of a decorated war veteran who was once among their colleagues in the Senate as a Republican," said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.

Privately, White House officials agreed that Mr. Hagel came across poorly. "No one would argue that he had a good performance," said one official, who declined to be named to be more candid.

Mr. Hagel has long been on the outs with some party mates because of policy disagreements with them over the years, which sometimes made him seem more like a Democrat. But stemming from their Senate ranks as he did, the intensity of their grilling was striking and illustrative of how the old ways of the Senate are disappearing.

With the current era of hyperpartisanship in Washington, the intra-Senate discord has reached new levels in the usually approbatory chamber in recent months, a place where a certain level of respect for fellow and retired members of the same party is generally more or less a given.

The easy, celebratory hearing afforded Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts on his way to confirmation as secretary of state was much more in keeping with Senate tradition than the smackdown delivered to Mr. Hagel, though his own search for answers did him no favors. The clubbiness of the Senate was what made the 1989 rejection of former Senator John Tower, Republican of Texas, for secretary of defense astonishing even with multiple tales of personal problems.

But Senate Republicans, in particular, who have added more conservative members to their ranks in the last two years, and who fear the constant and imminent threat of primary challengers from the right, have loosened their grip of late on the bonds that distinguish the Senate from any other legislative body.

In December, Bob Dole, the former majority leader, went to the Senate floor in a wheelchair to advocate for a disability treaty, and many of his Republican colleagues, including some who had praised the measure previously, waited for him to be wheeled away before turning the measure down. That would have been almost unthinkable in the past.

"Part of the shift in the Republican Party," said Don Ritchie, the Senate historian, "means that old-time senators like Dole who were to the right of their party when they came here are to the left of their party now because the party has shifted so much beneath them. This all reflects that a bit."

There were other moments as well. Earlier in the week, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, took to talk radio to refer to a Republican colleague, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, as "amazingly naïve" for his proposals to overhaul the nation's immigration system. Mr. Rubio did not choose to respond or question the judgment of Mr. Vitter, whose phone number once appeared in a client list of a Washington madam.