(Guest column by Cliff Smith, the Advocate/Times-Picayune, Aug. 22) In June, U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, announced he was retiring after opposing President Donald Trump on the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, due to myriad concerns about the bill and how the vote was handled. Tillis was unsparing in his criticism of the culture he’d decided to leave.
“Too many elected officials are motivated by pure raw politics who really don’t give a damn about the people they promised to represent on the campaign trail,” he said. He followed up by saying that, for the remainder of his term, “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit.”
His stinging indictment of Washington was uncharacteristically blunt.
But in choosing not to run for reelection, he’d removed most real consequences. But it raises the question: Why only now call balls and strikes? Is an office worth keeping for its own sake alone?
On Oct. 9, 1964, a time no less polarized than now, President Lyndon Baines Johnson raised these issues to every major officeholder in Louisiana in a too-little remembered speech at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans. Johnson was running for reelection, having signed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act months earlier. Johnson knew the bill was toxic in Louisiana at the time. Instead of dodging the issue, he decided to call out the cowardice and hypocrisy of his fellow Southern politicians….
LBJ’s meaning was as clear as it was indirect: Too many of his fellow politicians were wasting their political careers by ignoring the reasons they sought office in the first place, and engaging in the basest prejudices just to hold office. His unnamed senator only realized in his last days that he’d had the opportunity to do good but chose the easy path instead.
Louisiana’s U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy has publicly struggled with this dilemma. After a landslide reelection in 2020, Cassidy boldly voted in the second impeachment proceeding to convict President Donald Trump for his clear misdeeds on Jan. 6, 2021, but Trump’s surprising rebirth put him in a bind. Cassidy was clearly troubled by the nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services, but he ultimately supported him…. [This is an excellent column, well worth reading in its entirety, here.]
