After Donald Trump left the White House in early 2021, many prominent figures in Republican politics assumed that he had effectively set his political career on fire. By any sane measure, this was an understandable assumption: The then-former president had just plotted to seize illegitimate power and bore responsibility for an insurrectionist attack on his own country’s seat of government.
The idea that Trump would maintain a leadership role in American politics wasn’t just wrong; at the time, it seemed utterly ridiculous.
With this in mind, when the then-former president was impeached for his role in trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election, several GOP officials felt comfortable voting their conscience instead of toeing the party line. Indeed, the impeachment vote was the most bipartisan in the nation’s history: 10 House Republicans voted to hold Trump accountable, as did seven Senate Republicans.
Almost all of those 17 GOP lawmakers are now gone from Capitol Hill, and one will soon join them: Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana suffered an embarrassing loss on Saturday, finishing third in his primary race and failing to advance to a June runoff. Six years after winning re-election by a 40-point margin, the incumbent finished with just less than 25% of the intraparty vote.
There’s no great mystery as to what happened: The incumbent president set out to destroy Cassidy for his 2021 impeachment vote, and he succeeded in his goal. The senator had spent the past year and a half trying to thread a partisan needle — up to and including confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation’s health secretary, in direct contradiction to the senator’s ostensible principles about medicine and public health — but those efforts ultimately amounted to nothing.
Looking ahead, however, the dynamic that’s worth appreciating isn’t just whether Trump got his revenge against Cassidy, but also whether Cassidy might yet get some revenge against Trump.
MS NOW’s report highlighted a notable quote from the senator’s concession speech:
“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim the election was stolen,” Cassidy said as applause from supporters overtook him in a speech after his loss.
In the same concession speech, the Louisiana Republican added, “Let me just set the record straight: Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others by using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
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He didn’t mention Trump by name, but he didn’t have to. Cassidy’s point wasn’t exactly subtle.
It’s a longstanding truism in politics: Members tend to show their true colors after they announce their retirement and they no longer have to worry about traditional electoral pressures. But this also applies, to an even greater extent, to members who have lost primaries and who suddenly have the opportunity to do as they please.
For the past year and a half, Cassidy, desperate to keep his job and avoid becoming the first elected senator to lose a primary in more than a decade, has kept his head down, sticking to a partisan script and avoiding confrontations with the White House.
But the Louisianan’s term doesn’t end for another 230 days.
It’s possible, of course, that Cassidy, who’s been a conservative throughout his two-decade career in elected office, will keep voting as he’s been voting and will just coast through the next six months in relative obscurity. But it’s also possible that the senator — who chairs a powerful committee — will build on the kinds of sentiments he shared in his concession speech and become a real thorn in the side of the president who ended his career.
When we think about the kinds of GOP senators who are occasionally willing to show some hints of independent thinking, we tend to focus on members such as Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Maine’s Susan Collins. Since Trump returned to power, few have seen Cassidy as part of this contingent. Don’t be surprised if that soon changes.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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