A Sequel to “The Big Pretending”

Bill Cassidy looked very concerned again this week. That’s been a big part of his job. Acting concerned. Projecting thoughtfulness. He had a whole supporting cast with past performances. Susan Collins furrowing her brow in a Senate hallway, Lisa Murkowski suffering unbearable concern before extracting a king crab quota in exchange for her vote, Cassidy himself doing what we called, at the time, the physician looking worried as a grave specialist routine. Expressed publicly, in front of the cameras, just before falling back in line and voting the way the party needed all along. The spine always made an appearance. It just never stayed long.

Now Cassidy is, technically, unemployed. Louisiana fired him in May at Trump’s behest. You’d think a man with nothing left to lose would finally stop performing. Nope. He went all in. Like, time for my cameo all in. The role of indignant Senator, standing up for the Constitutionally designed role of Congress, speaking out for the people, we give you the one and only furious Senator Doctor Bill Cassidy.

Here is what happened, because what actually happened is funnier than anything we could have invented.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed a war powers resolution telling Trump to get congressional authorization for the war in Iran or get out of it. Cassidy bucked the party and voted for it. So did three other Republicans. The resolution passed 50-48. Trump did not enjoy this.

On Wednesday, at a steering committee lunch convened mainly to push his election overhaul bill, Trump used the time instead to excoriate the senators who had dared limit his war powers. He asked why anyone would vote for such a thing. Cassidy raised his hand and asked whether that was a rhetorical question or a real one. Trump said real. Cassidy stood up and told him the war was supposed to last four weeks and was closing in on four months, and he wanted to know what was actually happening. Trump did not care for this. He raised his voice. Cassidy raised his back. A colleague had to pull him down into his chair. Trump called him a lunatic, brought up the primary loss for good measure, and the room watched two Republicans yell at each other over the question of whether anyone should know what their own government is doing in the Middle East.

This is the part where the performance usually ends and the floor vote happens and everyone goes home. Instead, Cassidy reportedly slipped a note to Steve Witkoff, the special envoy sitting nearby, asking for a briefing. By Wednesday afternoon he was at the White House getting one, courtesy of Witkoff and Vice President Vance. By Wednesday night he was back on the floor voting to kill a second, nearly identical war powers resolution. The vote failed, 47-50-1. Trump got his win. Cassidy got his briefing. Just Cassidy. Not the Senate. A little one on one parley.

Asked afterward what changed his mind, Cassidy did not claim a conversion. He did not reveal newly discovered facts that gave him comfort and confidence in the war’s progress. He said, on Face the Nation, with no apparent awareness that he was causing many of us to roll eyes and throw things, “In one sense, I actually accomplished the mission of what I needed to do.” What was that exactly? And for who? You or the American people?

He needed a briefing. He got a briefing. The vote that produced the briefing got reversed the moment the briefing was delivered. That is not a man who found his conscience. That is a man who found a vending machine, pressed a button, and got something out the front. He was very upfront about the pressing. He has been considerably less upfront about what dropped into the tray.

It would almost be more dignified if he’d simply caved. Caving is common. Caving requires no further explanation. What Cassidy did instead was identify, narrate, and confirm the transaction in real time, on television, days later, apparently confident that saying so plainly counts as vindication, when it reads, to the rest of us, like a confession he doesn’t realize he’s making.

So we are left with the question the man himself seems uninterested in answering: what does Bill Cassidy actually want, and what did he get for his vote?

He is not running for anything. Louisiana Republicans made that decision for him in May, decisively, by a margin that left no runoff in doubt. He has nothing left to campaign for and nothing left to lose, which is supposed to be the precise condition under which a politician finally says what he thinks. Several of his colleagues took that path this spring. Cassidy took the other one. He performs defiance loudly enough to make the news, then trades it back at the first opportunity for something the administration can hand him personally. Some quality one on one time. A chance to negotiate. It’s cold out here. Let me back in.

There is precedent for this, and it doesn’t belong to Cassidy. Lisa Murkowski has run a version of this play for years. Express grave concern, hold the vote hostage just long enough, cash it in for something concrete before letting it through. The concern was never about the concern. It bought access to the vending machine.

Cassidy asked her to hold his beer and ran the same strategy at hyper speed. The note to Witkoff. The summons to the White House within the hour. The briefing delivered before dinner. The vote reversed before midnight. Show momma how it’s done.

Here is where the comparison stops being funny. When Murkowski runs this play, Alaska generally gets something. A quota. A health center. Something a constituent could point to. What’s missing from Cassidy’s version is that part. He has a deadline nobody else in that chamber is working against, a vote that’s the only leverage he has left, expiring the day Letlow or Fleming is sworn in. He has no future to spend it on. He has today. Today, apparently, was enough to ask for something. What was public was the invitation. What was not public, and still isn’t, is whatever got negotiated once he sat down at the table.

So which is it? Did he negotiate for Louisiana, or for himself?

If it was for himself, there’s an obvious chair to eye. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has had a rocky tenure at Health and Human Services, by most measures including some of Cassidy’s own, and he never really fit the part to begin with. Cassidy, a physician who chaired the Senate health committee for years, fits it considerably better than the man currently sitting in it. If Cassidy is shopping for a landing spot, that one’s hanging open at eye level.

Even if that’s the deal he made, he’s ignoring this administration’s track record regarding making good on a deal. Loyalty here is not a virtue you bank for later. It is about Trump, today, and what he needs signed, voted, or defended by sundown. There is no five-year plan being protected, only whoever is useful for the next vote. Kennedy’s wobbly record hasn’t cost him the job yet, which only proves the position was never about performance. The only record that matters is today’s fealty. The clock resets every morning. Kennedy is one bad day from replacement, same as anyone standing near this president, Cassidy included. Whatever Cassidy thinks he bought for himself Wednesday has roughly the shelf life of a carton of milk left outside In New Orleans in July.

Hiring a Kennedy was never really about Kennedy. It was a middle finger aimed straight at the Democratic Party, the loudest possible way to say their most famous bloodline now works for him. That’s why he hired him, and we all know it. It’s harder to picture the actual relationship lasting. A germaphobe who can’t stand a damp handshake, sharing a Cabinet table with a man who swims in water you wouldn’t hose a driveway with and digs around in roadkill for fun. Trump probably does his own imitation of Kennedy’s voice every time the guy exits the room, and the rest of the cabinet roars. The bond was never personal. It was a trophy. And firing him would be just as satisfying as the hiring, for the same reason a man sleeps with his enemy’s daughter and then puts her out on the porch without her shoes once the novelty wears off. If he’s making a deal with this administration, Cassidy should probably get something in writing. Because for all the same reasons, he might quickly find himself back out on the porch.

So I have questions, and I don’t mind asking them out loud. What does Senator Doctor Cassidy want? Is he angling for Kennedy’s job? A chance to redeem himself for providing the disastrous deciding vote in Kennedy’s confirmation? Is he asking Trump to clear the field if he runs for governor? Would a smaller post do, something that lets him keep shaping national healthcare policy from the inside? Or is the whole thing smaller than any of that, a truce, let the past be the past, stop the public abuse, and I’ll give you my vote when you need it. Maybe there were federal dollars on the table. FEMA money. Coastal erosion funding. Something for the seafood industry. Anything Louisiana might actually use.

If none of that is true, if the briefing really was only about Iran, where is the report? He told us he got briefed. He has not told us what he learned. We know the meeting happened. We know the vote flipped. We do not know a single new fact about the war that we did not already know on Tuesday. Whoop dee doo for us. Great work, Senator.

Whatever Bill Cassidy is actually after, he has made one thing clear beyond dispute. The spine that kept making cameo appearances and disappearing again still works exactly the way it always has. Stiffen it up in public, make a little performative stand, and someone in this administration will direct you to the vending machine. There may be others scattered about D.C. that take cash, but the one in the Senate only takes votes.

He just told us as much. We should probably believe him.

And the question remains. What dropped into the tray? And who will it benefit, Senator Doctor Bill Cassidy, or the state of Louisiana?