(Feb. 13) Louisiana U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy faced the hardest — and most closely watched — decision of his political life over whether to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s highly controversial nominee to be secretary of Health and Human Services. Columnists Quin Hillyer and Stephanie Grace discuss the fallout from the Republican physician’s “yes” vote, despite deep concerns he made plain in hearings before the Finance and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Grace: Quin, were you surprised that Cassidy voted the way he did?
Hillyer: Let me start by saying that I have generally been an admirer of Bill Cassidy. I think he has been a good senator and seems like a good man. But yes, I was definitely surprised.
I thought that on this nomination, of all nominations, Cassidy would believe that he could fall back on his background as a doctor — and if there were any one nomination where he could have gotten a pass, as it were, this was the one. And if there were any one nomination where he should have felt absolutely — professionally and ethically — bound to stop it, this was the one, because he knows darn well what an absolute frightening quack Robert F Kennedy Jr. is.
Grace: Right, and he really did a good job of showing that during the hearings. He talked a lot about vaccines. I didn’t know the extent to which Cassidy had worked specifically on vaccine research and immunization programs as a physician. So he really was speaking from a place of expertise, and having had patients become sick and die who could have been saved. It was very personal.
And the other thing he did very effectively in the Finance Committee hearing was to really show that Kennedy doesn’t understand in any depth how Medicare and Medicaid work. It was factual questioning aimed at soliciting his ideas, not gotcha questioning, but I think that made it even more damaging.
Hillyer: I agree with you. He was getting praise from all sources, right, middle and left, for his very sober, thoughtful, effective questioning of RFK. Philip Klein, in National Review Online, had a piece called “Bill Cassidy’s finest hour.” So again, if he needed political cover, that questioning gave him political cover, and then he backed out. … [And for what?!?]
Just last year, Kennedy was saying that he supports abortion all the way up until the moment of birth. He has supported price controls on medicine and a single-payer national socialized health care system. He has praised the basically communist former dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. He said that the National Rifle Association is a terrorist organization. He has said that oil and gas executives are traitors. He has said that climate change deniers should be jailed “for all eternity.” I mean, I can go on and on.
Grace: An incredible list, isn’t it?
Hillyer: Kennedy is a radical leftist, yeah, and he’s a nutcase. He has said COVID was race-engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews. He has said that the HIV-AIDS link is phony, that Lyme disease is a deliberate bioweapon, and he has said that putting fluoride in the water creates more gay children.
[The rest of this colloquy is at this link.]
