Whether he believes the impression he conveys, now Louisiana voters are receiving confirmation about the real Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, fueled by his seriously endangered reelection chances.
Cassidy had something to say about a tragic shooting in Minneapolis, where far left activists intentionally have invited confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officials to serve a political agenda unconcerned with the rights of illegal aliens. A man, who has been described as ardently dissatisfied with GOP Pres. Donald Trump, apparently brandishing a pistol was in the process of being disarmed by agents when a gunshot, seemingly from the weapon, went off and an agent shot the suspect to death.
Unfortunately, the man showed poor judgment in deliberately bringing a firearm to a location where he acted to disrupt armed officers performing duties under the color of law and apparently not immediately identifying himself as carrying a concealed and loaded weapon. With the evidence so far gathered, a leading theory is that the weapon discharged accidentally, with the man possibly disoriented after having been sprayed with pepper along with a woman right before the disarming attempt.
The Trump Administration noted that, as in all such incidents, an investigation as typical will be conducted; a similar incident recently where it appeared a protester tried to ram an agent with a vehicle also is under such investigation. Yet immediately, elected Democrats, employing a rather double standard, began pushing a narrative that somehow this wouldn’t be the case as if saying it enough times would convert fiction to fact.
And Cassidy jumped right on their bandwagon, becoming the only Washington Republican in Congress to do so. Curiously, he didn’t call for the same for the first incident, but his motivations in each case become clear when understanding the timeline involved.
Until this week, Cassidy had spent the past year trying to join himself to Trump’s hip after the president won his second term. This was because four years earlier Cassidy had gambled on Trump’s power fading after failing to win reelection and, in a contradicted, poorly-reasoned, and evidence-free decision, voted in a failed effort to convict Trump in an impeachment attempt. As Trump reassumed office, that came back to haunt Cassidy, who since enthusiastically had backed Trump Administration policies with only rare, oblique critiques.
This was an effort to prevent hemorrhaging voters in Louisiana miffed at Cassidy for that and subsequently playing footsie with Democrats on policy from 2021-24. His endgame was hoping that Trump wouldn’t endorse another Republican candidate for the Senate.
That all changed when Trump, for the first time, last week endorsed against a sitting GOP senator, giving his imprimatur in the state’s race to Republican Rep. Julia Letlow who quickly announced her running against Cassidy. The blow doubled as Letlow is a less conservative politician like Cassidy but solid Trump supporter, with the nod essentially telling voters with questions about the more conservative candidates in the race that now with her entrance a more moderate version was available but without Cassidy’s anti-Trump baggage. Letlow’s entry makes what was a nontrivial chance he could fail to make the party nomination runoff into a significantly likely outcome.
So, it’s time for Cassidy to go for broke, either revealing he’s much more in tune with Democrats that he has been trying to hide or making a cynical political calculation that by taking a step to the left he can attract more voters given the new electoral dynamics. Because he failed in his objective to prevent an endorsement of another, on this occasion and likely henceforth Cassidy has taken the gloves off and, with his joining in making a snide implication that the Trump Administration is obstructionist, has resumed his anti-Trump patois.
It's the real Cassidy, the exposition of which may or may not be enough to save his job.
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