Hey Sen. Cassidy, Your Pro-Impeachment Vote Won’t Play Back Home

I’ve got a confession to make. If I was in the Senate I’d vote the same way Bill Cassidy and the Senate’s five incorrigible RINO’s – Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, Lisa Murkowski and Pat Toomey – voted on yesterday’s question whether the Peach Mint Insurrection was constitutional.

And not because it’s constitutional. It most certainly is not. In fact, it’s an abject kick in the nuts to the Constitution, and not even because of the constitutional absurdity of impeaching a private citizen.

It’s unconstitutional because the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, must preside over the impeachment trial as provided in the Constitution, and Roberts has refused to preside over this kangaroo court. Instead, Chuck Schumer has installed the decrepit leftist Pat Leahy to preside over the trial. Leahy isn’t a judge; in the case of this show trial he’s a juror – and furthermore Leahy has publicly announced his intention to convict President Trump on the charge of inciting an insurrection before even having the facts presented.

That’s a grievous affront to due process and Western jurisprudence. It makes the Senate a disgraced and debauched institution, a parliament of whores from which nothing legitimate may now proceed.

But I would have been a “yes” vote with Cassidy, Collins and the rest of the weak and the stupid among the Senate’s Republican caucus for a perfectly legitimate reason.

Which is that it’s in the interest of both the Republican Party and the American people to bottle the Democrats up in a hopeless waste of time attempting to convict a private citizen on an unconstitutional impeachment the courts would undoubtedly throw out even in the impossible event that 67 Senators would actually agree to it. Because if Schumer and his mental-midget caucus are fixated on having a cathartic, pointless gesture of making institutionalized political attacks on ex-presidents, that’s a lot less injurious to the average American than passing a $15 minimum wage that puts 1.4 million of us out of work, or the Green New Deal which makes jobless a whole lot more. Or whatever other horrors are on their agenda.

I would have loudly announced that as my reasoning, and I would have shouted it from the treetops. I would have laughed in their faces as I voted with them, castigating them for their utter and complete stupidity. I would have told them I was following Napoleon’s maxim that when your enemy is busy blundering, don’t interrupt him.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the reasoning Cassidy offered for his vote…

“We heard arguments from both sides on the constitutionality of having a Senate trial of a president who has since left office. A sufficient amount of evidence of constitutionality exists for the Senate to proceed with the trial. This vote is not a prejudgment on the final vote to convict,” said Dr. Cassidy. “If anyone disagrees with my vote and would like an explanation, I ask them to listen to the arguments presented by the House Managers and former President Trump’s lawyers. The House managers had much stronger constitutional arguments. The president’s team did not.”

Then he told this to CNBC

GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy said that he voted in favor of holding an impeachment trial because former President Donald Trump’s defense team did “a terrible job.” “Trump’s team was disorganized, they did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand. And when they talked about it, they kind of glided over it, almost as if they were embarrassed of their arguments,” Cassidy told reporters at the Capitol. “Now if I’m an impartial juror and one side is doing a great job and the other side is doing a terrible job on the issue at hand, as an impartial juror, I’m going to vote for the side that did the good job,” he said.

So Cassidy, a doctor, is going to judge the lawyers for their lawyering. He does realize this whole thing is a political dog-and-pony show, right?

Unless Cassidy agrees with me and he’s playing it coy, this is a career-ending mistake on his part and there is zero point in Bill Cassidy running for re-election. In fact, he would do well to resign his seat as soon as there is a Republican governor in Louisiana available to replace him.

Cassidy could well be formally censured by the LAGOP when its Executive Committee next meets, which is likely to be very soon. Here’s what the party had to say after Cassidy’s vote…

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The Republican Party of Louisiana is profoundly disappointed by Senator Bill Cassidy’s vote on the constitutionality of the impeachment trial now underway against former President, now private citizen, Donald J. Trump. We feel that an impeachment trial of a private citizen is not only an unconstitutional act, but also an attack on the very foundation of American democracy, which will have far reaching and unforeseen consequences for our republic.

We also remind all Americans that former President Trump is innocent of the politically motivated, bogus charges now pending against him in a kangaroo court presided over by an openly hostile political opponent. How far justice has fallen in the short time that Democrats have been in control of the federal government!

We salute Senator John Kennedy for remaining steadfast in his opposition to the fake impeachment trial now underway in Washington, DC. Senator Kennedy has clearly made the right decision once again.

The worst part of this is Cassidy was not a NeverTrumper before Nov. 3, when the people of Louisiana overwhelmingly re-elected him. No Republican of stature opposed him, while the Democrats offered up the laughable leftist Adrian Perkins, who ran one of the least effective campaigns in modern history. Cassidy earned 58 percent of the vote against a large field of nobodies, mostly on the strength of messaging like this…

Bill Cassidy was no Ben Sasse, who at least is consistent in his clownish sanctimony. Cassidy aligned himself with Trump and got re-elected with a nearly identical percentage of the vote in Louisiana on Nov. 3.

Perhaps one could argue that what happened on Jan. 6 changed all that, but it isn’t an argument anybody back home is going to buy.

There will be consequences to this, though perhaps none Cassidy will fear. After all, he’ll be 69 on Election Day in 2026 when he comes up again. That isn’t inordinately old for a U.S. Senator, but it’s old enough to retire gracefully.

Which might be his best call. This vote won’t be forgotten even if Cassidy takes the out, which is to say later that “based on the evidence,” Trump isn’t guilty of the charge of inciting an insurrection, that the coming kangaroo court will offer him. The damage is already done, and he’s lost whatever institutional support within the Louisiana Republican Party he might have had.

It’s too bad, really. We’ve always liked Cassidy and appreciated his earnestness, even if it resulted in the occasional black eye for him and his party.

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