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Washington
CNN
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Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a former physician who has spent his career touting the safety of vaccines, will likely determine whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, becomes the country’s next Health and Human Services secretary.
Cassidy, a former gastroenterologist with a tough reelection campaign ahead, revealed at Thursday’s confirmation hearing he had “reservations” about Kennedy’s past positions on vaccine safety. The GOP senator then returned to his home state over the weekend to two conflicting pressure campaigns: one to stick to his previously held positions about vaccines and oppose Kennedy, and the other to support President Donald Trump’s nominee given that he hails from a ruby-red state that voted overwhelmingly for the president and his message.
The onslaught of dual messages poured through the phone lines and stacked up in the office’s email inbox, with some users getting notices that the site was temporarily unavailable due to maintenance, according to notifications shared with CNN.
Cassidy, who spoke to Kennedy over the weekend, according to a source familiar with the matter, has kept his decision close to the chest, but will reveal where he stands on Tuesday when the Senate Finance Committee votes on whether to advance Kennedy’s nomination, one of the final steps before the full Senate would vote.
The state’s governor, Jeff Landry, and the Louisiana Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative state house members, each sent a letter to Cassidy last week urging him to back Kennedy’s nomination.
One of the co-signers, Republican Louisiana state Rep. Beryl Amedée, put Cassidy’s vote in a political context, telling CNN, “I do believe that if he votes against this nomination, that would be like a nail in the coffin. For many people that are watching, that would be like the last straw.”
Another state lawmaker who signed the letter, Republican state Rep. Raymond Crews, told CNN that if Cassidy voted against Kennedy, “I think there’s no way he would be reelected, no matter how much money he’s got in his war chest.”
At the same time, multiple pro-vaccine groups launched efforts seeking to get to Cassidy directly.
Louisiana doctors have made hundreds of emails and calls pushing Cassidy to reject Kennedy’s nomination, through multiple pro-vaccine advocacy groups, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
One of the draft emails, reviewed by CNN, quoted Cassidy’s own words of skepticism against Kennedy from Thursday’s hearing and added, “May your compassion give you strength in this difficult time and continue to embolden you in such a time as this.”
The founder of Louisiana Families for Vaccines told CNN that her group has an uphill battle to climb in the state.
“Louisiana Families for Vaccines is the first coordinated, grassroots pro-vaccine movement in the state and it was only founded in 2022. In contrast, the anti-vaccine movement is one of the most well-funded and influential forces undermining public health in Louisiana and the US,” the group’s founder, Jennifer Herricks, told CNN.
“But now, with anti-vaccine activists being nominated to top public health positions, people are realizing what’s at stake. We are seeing unprecedented engagement, and the pro-vaccine majority is speaking out like never before,” Herricks added. “Senator Cassidy has the opportunity to add to his legacy of ensuring families are informed and have access to lifesaving vaccines.”
As the pressure campaigns continue, Senate Republican leadership has been working to lock down their members ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
Asked about if he’d spent much time talking to Cassidy over the weekend, GOP Leader John Thune said conversations were “occurring with members of both the Finance and the (Health, Education, Labor and Pension) Committee, but I mean mainly with the Finance Committee because that’s where he’s going to be voted out.”
Cassidy’s familiarity with pressure campaigns
It’s not the first time Cassidy has faced pressure from back home, as Trump’s most fervent supporters went after the senator for voting to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial.
“He’s cast hard votes as you know in the past so he’s not afraid of casting hard votes,” Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas and fellow member of the Finance committee said.
But Cassidy, colleagues say, isn’t one to easily bend to pressure.
“Pressure is only pressure if you feel it,” Sen. John Kennedy, a fellow Louisianan, told CNN on Monday. “I’ve talked to Bill a couple of times over the weekend. I don’t know what he’s going to do but whatever he’s going to do, he’s very serene about it.”
Cassidy has tried to make clear he wants to support Trump’s agenda in the second term and has tried very carefully to thread the needle with his public comments that a vote against Kennedy isn’t a vote against Trump at all but instead an effort to protect the Trump administration from a miscalculation that could cost them politically.
“I’m a Republican. I represent the amazing state of Louisiana and as a patriotic American, I want President Trump’s policies to succeed in making America and Americans more secure, more prosperous, healthier,” Cassidy said Thursday. “But if there is someone that is not vaccinated because of policies or attitudes you bring to the department and there is another 18-year-old who dies of a vaccine-preventable disease, helicoptered away, God forbid dies, it’ll be blown up in the press.”
In Louisiana, Kennedy is a fairly well-known figure to his constituents, having been thrust in the middle of a 2021 debate the state was having about whether to require the Covid-19 vaccine to be included in list of immunizations that children got to attend public school. The rule would have allowed parents to opt out for a litany of reasons, but the requirement was a lightning rod where Kennedy weighed in.
During his time in the Senate, Cassidy has built a reputation as a deliberate and serious policy maker, sometimes letting his commitments to certain issues including health care and infrastructure overpower political considerations that may deter other lawmakers from jumping into the fray.
In the midst of a meltdown over the GOP Senate’s effort to repeal and replace Obamacare in 2017, Cassidy worked with a small number of other GOP senators, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, to introduce a last-ditch bill that would have dismantled Obamacare and replaced it with a controversial block grant program. The bill, which was rejected by a number of GOP members, never got a vote on the floor.
Cassidy injected himself once again into a major policy debate in 2021 – this time on infrastructure where he worked with Republican then-Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio and Democrats to find a bipartisan compromise to secure more than $1 trillion in funding for the nation’s crumbling roads, invest in broadband and other flood mitigation programs that are crucial for Cassidy’s home state of Louisiana. Trump opposed the bill, calling it a “disgrace” and pressuring GOP members to back away from it, writing at the time, “It is a gift to the Democrat Party, compliments of Mitch McConnell and some RINOs , who have no idea what they are doing.”
Cassidy voted for it anyway, securing $6 billion for Louisiana’s roads, authorizing the construction of a major thoroughfare through in his state and shoring up millions in funding to help guard against future flooding.
In his line of questioning of Kennedy over two days both in the Senate Finance and HELP Committees, Cassidy tried to drill down on Kennedy’s exact positions on vaccines and how he would reform Medicaid.
Looking directly at Kennedy during his confirmation hearing, Cassidy said, “Your past of undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments concerns me. Can I trust that that is now in the past? Can data and information change your opinion or will you only look for data supporting a predetermined conclusion?”
Detailing his medical career working in public hospitals, Cassidy said an “inflection point” was when he loaded an 18-year-old woman onto an air ambulance to get a liver transplant after going into acute liver failure due to Hepatitis B.
“It was the worst day of my medical career,” he said.
CNN’s Manu Raju contributed to this report.
