Sen. Bill Cassidy’s advocacy for vaccines and his résumé as a doctor bear defined his political occupation.
Now, these credentials are striking his Senate future in peril as Cassidy, R-La., prepares for primarily the most complex main of his lifestyles Saturday.
Contributors of the “Construct The US Healthy Any other time” circulation — a separate but overlapping cruise of the MAGA circulation that fully fused with President Donald Trump’s coalition in 2024 — were working laborious to dangle Cassidy down and install Trump-backed Accept. Julia Letlow because the Republican nominee for the Senate in deep-purple Louisiana.
Cassidy used to be the first vote to substantiate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, as health and human companies secretary. Nonetheless since then, Cassidy, a health care provider who is pro-vaccine, has came all the design by design of himself in battle with Kennedy and his allies, including months of clashes with Kennedy over his vaccine skepticism and his actions on the Department of Well being and Human Products and companies.
And while Cassidy’s vote to convict Trump on Jan. 6-linked impeachment costs in 2021 moreover made him a goal of the upright, it’s the traumatic relationship between Cassidy and Kennedy’s MAHA circulation that has indubitably boiled over sooner than the first. Early this month, Trump blamed Cassidy — who chairs the Well being, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — for standing within the design of Dr. Casey Skill’ nomination to be surgeon traditional, forcing Trump to interchange her with a original nominee. Skill is a wellness influencer and shut ally of Kennedy.
“I nominated Casey, a solid MAHA Warrior, on the advice of Secretary Kennedy, who understands the MAHA Movement better than somebody, with perchance the most likely exception of ME!” Trump wrote on social media. “On the different hand, despite Senator Cassidy’s intransigence and political games, Casey will proceed to battle for MAHA on the a grand different of important Well being points facing our Country.”
Up unless that social media post, Trump hadn’t at as soon as attacked Cassidy phenomenal, despite having endorsed Letlow in January. Nonetheless the Skill saga clearly touched a nerve.
Kennedy moreover accused Cassidy of holding up the nomination and “sabotaging” Skill’ appointment.
“Bill Cassidy as soon as extra did the soiled work for entrenched interests on the lookout for to stall the MAHA circulation and offer protection to the very attach quo that has made The US the sickest nation on earth,” he wrote on X.
