Dem
47
GOP
53
Sen. Bill Cassidy is an M.D. specializing in treating liver disease. He did that work for over 20 years, during which time he was a Democrat. When he ran for public office in 2006 for the first time, he ran as a Republican for the Louisiana House. He was then elected to the U.S. Senate in 2014. In 2021, when Donald Trump was impeached for the second time, Cassidy voted to convict him, saying: "Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty."
When the nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr. as secretary of HHS came before the Senate, Cassidy grilled Kennedy on vaccines. Kennedy lied through his teeth, Cassidy pretended to believe the answers, and then voted to confirm him. As a doctor, Cassidy knows very well that vaccines are one of the greatest advances in public health in all of history. But he also knew that if he voted to sink Kennedy's nomination, Donald Trump would endorse someone to run against him in the Republican primary and he would soon have to go back to treating people with liver disease. Cassidy bit his lip, voted for Kennedy, and hoped the danger to his career was now gone.
Wrong. When you give in to a bully, he always comes back for more. Despite Cassidy giving Trump what he wanted, Trump has now endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) for Cassidy's seat. She may formally announce her challenge as soon as today.
Now Cassidy will go down in history as an enabler of all the medical disasters that Kennedy is causing, and will cause in the future, and he probably still won't even get to keep his seat. If Cassidy had done the right thing and voted Kennedy down, he would still have lost his seat, but the history books would then have recorded that he went down trying to protect the American people from a charlatan who could cause great harm. Instead it will be written that he went down trying to appease a bully and the bully was not appeased.
Interestingly enough, the changes in Louisiana election law that Gov. Jeff Landry (R) rammed through last year will probably be Cassidy's undoing. In the past, Louisiana had a jungle primary, but that is no more. In a jungle primary, the top two finishers meet in a runoff a few weeks after the primary. Under that system, Cassidy would probably have faced off against Letlow in the runoff—and won due to Democrats who see him as the least-bad option. Now Louisiana has closed partisan primaries for Senate elections, so if he makes a kamikaze run he will probably lose the partisan Republican primary to Letlow and go back to treating sick livers. (V)