WELL WELL WELL. So it turns out voting to impeach Donald Trump in a deeply-red MAGA state was not, politically speaking, a galaxy-brain maneuver by ex-swamp denizen Bill Cassidy, amirite? Because he is gone, baby, gone.
But Louisiana conservatives didn’t boot him from office over one vote alone. Between backing establishment priorities, flirting with speech-policing legislation conservatives hated, and taking positions conveniently helpful to Big Pharma, Cassidy steadily drifted away from the folks who once sent him to Washington.
To put it another way: good riddance.
Sure, Cassidy’s vote to convict Trump during the 2021 impeachment circus was the headline-grabber, and understandably so. But over the years, the Louisiana Republican kept finding himself on the wrong side of issue after issue that mattered to the MAGA base. The impeachment vote wasn’t the whole story. It was just the final straw.
One example was Cassidy sponsoring the deceptively-named “Kids Online Safety Act,” or KOSA, a bill many conservatives viewed as a Trojan horse for online censorship. Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise — two Louisiana Republicans who somehow managed not to get politically vaporized by their own voters — refused to even bring the thing to the House floor.
Former Senator Rick Santorum, hardly some fringe internet crank, warned back in 2024 that KOSA would “result in more content of the type that conservatives in states like Florida have been trying to keep away from kids making its way onto their screens.” Opponents argued the bill would inevitably pressure social media companies to suppress conservative speech while boosting the same gender ideology and DEI content conservatives have spent years fighting against.
Scalise allies were reportedly so concerned about the bill’s censorship implications that they spent years sounding the alarm about it. Cassidy, meanwhile, just kept plowing ahead.
Then there was Cassidy’s hostility toward 340B, the federal drug discount program that rural hospitals and working-class communities heavily rely on. Unsurprisingly, pharmaceutical companies absolutely despise the program and have spent enormous amounts of money trying to “reform” it into oblivion.
Cassidy just so happens to support that effort. And in a completely unrelated coincidence, his wife has a long history of investments tied to pharmaceutical companies.
Funny how that works.
Saturday night, Louisiana Republicans decided they’d seen enough. Cassidy didn’t even make it into a runoff.
So long, sucker. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.