Bill Cassidy: Unaccountable & Tone Deaf On RFK Jr.

from the fingers-and-no-thumbs dept

It appears Bill Cassidy is going to make every effort to ignore his own culpability for RFK Jr. on his way out the door. In case you need to be reminded, Cassidy was a key, if not deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his current role as Secretary of HHS. Cassidy’s background is as an MD and many of his GOP colleagues reportedly looked to his vote as to whether to support Kennedy’s nomination, despite Kennedy being perhaps the loudest evangelist for anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories on the planet. He voted to confirm Kennedy, leading several others to follow suit. It’s probably not inaccurate to say that Kennedy has his position because Cassidy voted for him.

Despite his attempts to lick Trump’s boots so clean that he could perform surgery with them, Cassidy lost his primary because his love for Trump went unrequited. In the immediate aftermath of that loss, Cassidy rediscovered his own backbone and flipped his vote from no to yes on the war powers resolution that went before the Senate. While that was bad enough for Cassidy to get a big ol’ middle finger from me, listening to him now try to poke a finger in Kennedy’s eye is a bridge too far.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) directly blamed Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses Thursday.

On the social media platform X, Cassidy shared a New York Times article reporting on hospitals seeing a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses, with doctors telling the outlet they’re frequently seeing illnesses they used to rarely encounter.

“A terrible outcome from RFK and others promoting vaccine skepticism,” wrote Cassidy.

This has to be one of the most tone-deaf things a sitting senator has ever uttered. And for several reasons. Chief among them is that Cassidy is the one who helped promote vaccine skepticism by literally promoting a brain-addled anti-vaxxer into a cabinet position in charge of Americans’ health. To crow about the consequences of the very HHS administration Cassidy helped to put in place is befuddling in the extreme. Cassidy has ownership of this, whether he wants to admit it or not.

And, again, Cassidy had every opportunity to try to do something to correct his own mistake before he fumbled his incumbency so badly. There were impeachment efforts around Kennedy that he could have helped bolster. He could have crafted legislation to try to mitigate Kennedy’s worst actions in his role. He could have done literally anything other than complain publicly that Kennedy lied to him during his confirmation hearings and then just leaving it at that.

Cassidy has a few months left in office and then he will disappear into the vapor. If he wants to do something, then he should do something. This very much isn’t that and the fact that it’s coming in the wake of his no longer having any stakes in electoral politics is pathetic.

Filed Under: bill cassidy, health & human services, rfk jr., vaccines