Committee Chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., greets Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., May 14, 2025.John McDonnell/AP
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Sen. Bill Cassidy may remember coming in third place, but the American people will be left with his legacy of playing a role in degrading the nation’s health care system.
On Saturday, Cassidy won only roughly 25 percent of the vote for Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary—in a group of candidates led by President Donald Trump’s pick, Julia Letlow—thereby failing to qualify for the runoff in June. Cassidy’s political demise apparently was the first time an elected senator placed third or worse in a primary since 1944.
Cassidy, who practiced as a physician and has said he understands the “absolute scientifically based understanding that vaccines are safe,” provided the deciding vote in favor of advancing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health secretary in February 2025. “We need a leader at HHS who will guide President Trump’s agenda to Make America Healthy Again,” the longtime GOP senator said during his floor speech explaining his support. “Based on Mr. Kennedy’s assurances on vaccines and his platform to positively influence Americans’ health, it is my consideration that he will get this done.”
RFK Jr. has since launched a war on vaccines, while Cassidy has offered little more than passive criticisms. Trump’s health secretary has alsodismantled huge swaths of his department and replaced them with Trump loyalists. So much for “Mr. Kennedy’s assurances.”
Cassidy has repeatedly refused to acknowledge that he made a mistake by confirming RFK Jr. As Julianne McShane wrote for Mother Jones last November, Cassidy admitted to CNN’s State of the Union host Jake Tapper that the CDC pushing unsubstantiated links between vaccines and autism on its website was problematic, but he downplayed the importance of the site and did not name RFK Jr. as a principal reason for the change in the health department’s direction.
Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial over the Jan. 6 insurrection, but since then, he has appeared to mostly bend over backwards to get on the president’s good side. Trump nonetheless attacked him as “disloyal” ahead of Saturday’s vote. Notably, as Mother Jones’ Sophie Hurwitz pointed out, only four members of Congress—out of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 and the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict him—won reelection. Cassidy is the latest example of why so many in his party continue to fear crossing Trump.
