“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” – Donald J. TrumpBy Marc C. Johnson
Bill Cassidy, now the lame duck United States Senator from Louisiana, is the latest case study in what it means in today’s Republican Party to follow your conscience and then decide to cravenly sell your soul to save your seat, or more correctly the part of one’s anatomy that lands on a seat.
Cassidy and his wife as he conceded Saturday night – only the second Louisiana senator in 94 years to lose re-election
His voyage from principle to pander means Cassidy, an incumbent senator and chairman of a major committee, ends up in third place in a primary, soon out of office and, one hopes, haunted for the rest of his days by abandonment of his Constitutional oath, his professional beliefs and what once passed for his character.
Cassidy is toast because the only thing that matters to the modern conservative movement are the whims, grievances and authoritarian aspirations of our American nightmare.
Cassidy is now a footnote to that nightmare and a pretty good example of how conservatism became Trumpism and why one suspects there is never any going back for the craven, character deficient elite class of Republicans.
Let’s briefly recount the arc of Cassidy’s career. He was once what passed for a “moderate” in the Republican Party, a semi-wonkish physician – a gastroenterologist – who rose to chair the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Years ago Cassidy helped found a clinic that provided health care for uninsured patients. After hurricane Katrina he helped turn an abandoned KMart into an emergency medical center. Once a Democrat, Cassidy served in the state legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives and finally the Senate.
His great conservative transgression that turned Donald Trump into an enemy was Cassidy’s vote to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection, a vote that got Cassidy censured by the Louisiana Republican Party.
Then Cassidy, knowing he faced re-election this year, pivoted, or tried to, to regain the blessings of a Trump endorsement. Cassidy’s shameless vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary was surely, at least in Cassidy’s mind, the ticket to re-election. Instead it became the source of his debasement.
Cassidy was not a vaccine denier. Kennedy is. Kennedy had to get past Cassidy’s committee to win confirmation. Cassidy’s vote could have stopped the months of abject nonsense and lasting damage to American public health that Kennedy has caused.
A physician who believed in the vast utility of vaccines could have made a stand on principle and facts. Instead Cassidy put his re-election before the well being of his constituents and his country. It doesn’t get much more craven than that, but once again this is the story of the modern Republican Party that stands for nothing but a vehicle for Trump’s corruption, venality and self interest.
Long-time Louisiana political observer and historian Bob Mann wrote:
… Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.
To quote James Carville in the New York Times earlier this week, “Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the Devil, and he didn’t get anything for it.”
Except that’s not entirely true.
What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.
I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.
I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.
Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.
It might have been different
Imagine an alternative world in which Bill Cassidy had stopped RFK, Jr. and, in turn, became a national spokesman for science and common sense in health policy. Cassidy might have spent the last year engaging in a campaign for hearts and heads of the vast majority of the American people who reject the sledgehammer Kennedy has taken to decades of scientific advancement.
Cassidy was, after all, the chair of the critical committee in the Senate. He had the history and credentials to be effective in the face of such stupidity.
Cassidy almost surely would have lost re-election in Louisiana. The Cult of Trump is very strong. But he could have left the Senate with his long reputation for seriousness more or less intact, and his role in politics might have been remembered as a profile in courage.
Yet in the the alternative, to appropriate the language of The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin, Cassidy agreed to “subordinate himself to Trump.”
Meanwhile, the Cult of Trumpism rolls along with more and greater corruption every day, more trashing of everything from vaccine policy to the NATO alliance, more denial by congressional Republicans that this rot has no bottom.
Just today, as we momentarily remember another Republican senator who squandered his character for less than nothing, Donald Trump engineered a deal with himself to loot the federal treasury of nearly $2 billion of our dollars to create a slush fund to fluff his friends. It’s the kind of corruption that Vladimir Putin might blush at, but not the Republican Party.
I began this piece with a quote from the Corrupter-in-Chief, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
As usual, Trump was wrong. It’s all too real and it is happening, and guys like Bill Cassidy tolerated it, ignored it and ultimately tried to profit from it.
Cassidy got what all of them deserve.
It’s difficult to be an optimist in today’s world and I’m not all that optimistic, but I do focus on realism and try to populate my writing with solid sourcing and not merely opinion. I write these pieces to offer a perspective based on history and particularly American political history since 1900.
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