On Friday morning, Sen. Bill Cassidy announced that he would vote to confirm Todd Blanche to be an attorney general after months of agonizing about doing so, all but guaranteeing the president’s former attorney will be the top official at the Department of Justice.
His remarks had come hours after fellow moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had announced that she would oppose Blanche’s confirmation and Sen Susan Collins of Maine announced the same. Earlier in the week, Cassidy, Murkowski and Blanche. The whole thing bore striking similarity to Cassidy’s vote to confirm anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
“I'll be criticized for this vote, what's new?” Cassidy said on the floor speech after he had laid out the case for and against confirming Blanche, alluding to the fact that many sharply criticized Cassidy, a gastroentrologist, for voting to confirm Kennedy.
Like Murkowski and Collins, Cassidy voted to convict Trump for his actions on January 6. But unlike Murkowski, who hails from a ranked choice state and won re-election in 2022, and Collins, who is up for re-election in a liberal New England state, Cassidy is already out of a job.
Trump endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow to defeat him in a primary. Cassidy lost the primary and will leave the Senate at the end of the year. Still, he has taken few substantive steps against Trump, save for one closed-door blow-up between the two men during a Senate luncheon.
So why did he do it? Cassidy is literally a free man to vote his conscience? In fact, he specifically objected to Blanche’s role in the creation of Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund for his political allies.
Part of this is due to the fact Cassidy remains chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and wants to maintain his ability to influence legislation. Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) saw their power significantly weaken after they lost their primary and announce their retirement, respectively. Both men tried to pressure Blanche to articulate the death of the weaponization fund, but both will be gone next year.
Cassidy has previously articulated his concerns with Blanche, specifically the fact Blanche previously worked as the president’s personal defense attorney.
“I have to be sure that he is an Attorney General who used to be the President's personal attorney, as opposed to being the president's personal attorney, who happens to be attorney general,” he told The Independent in June. “That's what I need to be convinced of.”
But during his floor speech, Cassidy bizarrely seemed to articulate that Blanche’s role as Trump’s former personal attorney would help, citing comments from Trump’s first-term Attorney General William Barr.
“He said that any attorney to represent a client well has to have tough conversations and confront the client with difficult truths, that because of his previous attorney-client relation with President Trump, Mr. Blanche would be precisely the person to push back on President Trump,” Cassidy said.
The near-uniform support for Blanche means that he will almost certainly be confirmed and that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will not need to return despite just being discharged from the hospital this week.
The announcement by Cassidy in many ways seems to confirm the cynicism that many people feel about politics. The fact that he delivered his speech just hours after Murkowski released her statement.
The whole thing reeks of horse-trading a vote swapping, a way to allow for Murkowski to maintain her independent streak–especially as Democrat Mary Peltola is in a competitive race against Alaska’s other Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan–while Cassidy takes the hit. In the same token, Cornyn and Tillis, no longer having to fear re-election or an angry tweet, seem to take the fall to give Collins a hall pass, all so that Blanche could still get confirmed.
Senators love to protect their reputation. Everyone loves to remember Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, another liberal Maine Republican, for denouncing Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts. But few remember that Smith’s campaign for president failed to archconservative Barry Goldwater, who paved the way for Ronald Reagan.
Senate Democrats longingly remember John McCain’s dramatic wee hours thumbs down that saved the Affordable Care Act, but he literally was dying of glioblastoma with the stitches in his head still visible.
Senators can care about their reputations as much as they want, but they are still partisans who have their own goals. And while Cassidy might be shamed for it, as he said, any internal hand-wringing will be nullified by his thumbs-up on the floor.
