Given the partisan nature of these things, it’s no surprise that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alternately received praise and furious criticism in front of a Senate committee on Wednesday.
But oddly, it was the panel’s chairman, Bill Cassidy, who found himself in a white-hot spotlight this week as he faced down a man who, despite his warnings against it, has rolled back vaccination standards for millions of Americans.
Cassidy, 68, is running for a third term as senator from Louisiana. So, on Wednesday, he was threading the needle as he pushed back against Kennedy’s speculation about vaccine efficacy while shying away from any real confrontation with the Health secretary, so it wouldn’t serve as a reminder of his vote to confirm him despite misgivings over RFK’s vow not to change federal vaccine recommendations.
That is an embarrassment Cassidy has yet to escape from.
But after RFK Jr. insisted that a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that almost none of the prevented deaths from chronic or infectious diseases in the 20th century were due to vaccinations, Cassidy had his moment to shine, raging senator to floundering Senate witness style — and he went soft.
Cassidy, instead of making a spectacle of the man who made him second-guess his confirmation vote, calmly fact-checked RFK Jr. in real time, with staff providing him the study cited by the secretary and Cassidy calmly laying out for the Cabinet official how he’d misread the findings.
“The ... paper was written before, for events before 1950, which is before the [measles] vaccine came out. But then the vaccine came out, and that’s when cases went from 3.5 million down to near zero, and deaths went to zero from 550 a year. So tremendous impact of the vaccination,” Cassidy lectured.
The tenor was markedly different from the Senate standard for such moments, most recently embodied in March’s hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when then-Secretary Kristi Noem took a verbal thrashing from Sen. John Kennedy (no relation to RFK Jr.), another Republican and Cassidy’s colleague on the Louisiana delegation. Kennedy’s blistering remarks continued after that hearing concluded.
“She spent a quarter of a billion dollars putting ads out across America, a quarter of a billion dollars, in which she was prominently displayed,” Sen. Kennedy told Fox News after his clash with Noem. “They looked a great deal like political ads. And I found that breathtaking, and when I see what I perceived to be spending porn, I don’t care who does it. I’m going to call it out.”
It also, of course, was overshadowed by the committee’s Democrats, who eagerly tore into RFK Jr. over his past rhetoric against measles vaccines, the administration’s rolling-back of Medicaid funding, and more.
A generally moderate Republican, Cassidy’s background as a physician and chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) has lined him up as the man on Capitol Hill with the job of proving that the Senate GOP is capable of conducting oversight of a Republican administration.
With Donald Trump in the White House, that prospect of intra-party congressional oversight has proved to be largely unrealistic. Cassidy’s support for Kennedy’s nomination in 2025, a political risk for the senator who has staked his reputation on his health care bonafides, was unreciprocated by Trump this year as the sitting president endorsed a primary challenge against Cassidy. Trump’s endorsements in many GOP primaries have proven to be the golden ticket assuring victory at the ballot box — at least until the general election. The real issue for Cassidy is his 2021 vote to impeach Trump following the attack on the Capitol, something the president has never forgiven.
Even Sen. Kennedy’s questioning of Noem reportedly only came after the president was already tiring of his DHS chief and seeking her ouster.
Now with Trump firmly opposed to his renomination but still reliant on a MAGA base to see him elected, Cassidy is forced into a lane similar to Georgia’s Brian Kemp as he remains unabashedly independent of Trump but still chained to the notion that he must work with, not against, the White House whenever possible. It’s the opposite problem faced by Larry Hogan, another anti-Trump Republican from Maryland who vowed to check Trump at every turn if put in charge of a blue state’s Senate seat in 2024.
The president is supporting Rep. Julia Letlow, another conservative and one of his loyalists in the House, for Cassidy’s seat.
Ahead of the hearing, a Republican strategist predicted to NOTUS that Cassidy would seek to align himself more closely with the secretary while also showing his oversight authority, which appeared to be an accurate read.
“He’s trying to split the baby on this. Naturally, he wants to be a little bit more aggressive against RFK Jr. and some of the things that he’s talking about,” they told NOTUS. “I wouldn’t say Republican voters are saying, like, ‘We love RFK Jr.’ But he is seen as an emissary of the president — that the president chose to run HHS for a reason. So there’s some residual support there.”
“I’d say [he’s] probably a little bit more supportive of RFK. Jr. because of those reasons,” they added.
But Cassidy’s obituary hasn’t been written yet. Polling suggests he remains highly competitive against Letlow, and he holds a large campaign war chest estimated at more than twice the size of his opponent’s. Trump, meanwhile, is sinking to his lowest approval ratings in years amid an increasingly unpopular and expensive war with Iran.
The senator could still easily emerge victorious next month, leaving one more Republican in office no longer tied to the president’s endorsement for his own political sur
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