On Tuesday I found myself waylaid by an AP reporter. My phone rang as I was getting out of my car and heading to the door of the place down the street where I eat lunch as often as not. And by the time I was done with the call I didn’t have enough time to go inside and eat before leaving for my next appointment.

That was irritating. The fact that when the story I was interviewed for popped on the internet today and my quote for the story was probably the least interesting thing I said, and it was literally the last line of the piece, didn’t help.

It was about Bill Cassidy’s sudden opposition to the changes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is making at the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services, and what import that has with respect to Cassidy’s electability in the Republican primary next year.

The quote they use from me was this:

“Cassidy has put himself in a situation for which there are really no wins,” Scott McKay, a Louisiana Republican who runs a conservative news website. “In all this, what he hasn’t bought is the goodwill of Trump voters.”

“A conservative news website.” Gee, thanks.

The story quotes Alan Seabaugh and Mike Bayham as essentially saying what I also said, which is that Cassidy’s vote to impeach President Trump back in January of 2021 destroyed his credibility with the majority of Louisiana voters who’ve gone for Trump in three straight presidential elections, and there isn’t a whole lot Cassidy can do in order to win those people back.

This is, of course, a serious problem when Cassidy has to face the hardest core of that majority in a Republican primary next year, and not only that, he’s got to survive a primary and a runoff in front of those folks.

One of Team Cassidy’s selling points as a defense against the ongoing fury over his Trump impeachment vote is that Cassidy swallowed hard and voted to confirm Kennedy as the HHS secretary – despite “serious reservations” that he had.

I told the AP reporter this and I wrote it somewhere – either here or at The American Spectator – this isn’t the flex they’re hoping it is.

Because nobody is fooled by this. Nobody thinks Cassidy voted to confirm Kennedy because he’s loyal to Trump. They know he made that vote because if he hadn’t, the voters would have showed up with pitchforks and torches to get him. This was about Cassidy’s skin, not Kennedy’s or Trump’s.

And the fact that Kennedy is a liberal whose stances on lots of things don’t match up with Republican or conservative canon doesn’t really matter. The fact is, there were Biden appointees who were pretty damned terrible whom Cassidy voted to confirm – among them Janet Yellen, Lloyd Austin and Jennifer Granholm. And he can’t vote to confirm Trump’s HHS secretary, who quit an independent presidential run and campaigned to help Trump win?

No, no. Nobody cares about your “serious reservations.”

So politically, now that RFK Junior is cleaning out the CDC – the director, a bureaucrat named Susan Monarez, was just essentially fired because she objected to the dismissal of the advisory board and a host of others over there, and this has led to the public health crowd throwing a collective fit over Kennedy’s management – it’s starting to look like Cassidy is attempting to distance himself from Trump on the issue of how HHS is being run.

Cassidy isn’t alone. Earlier this week John Kennedy was caught by reporters outside the capitol, and he did what some might call a bit of bedwetting over RFK Junior’s “chaos” at HHS…

RFK, Junior was set to testify in front of the Senate Finance Committee this morning, which promises to be relatively explosive.

But without a complete meltdown, which is highly unlikely, coming out strongly against him isn’t going to be some massive win for Cassidy.

Because what existed at HHS and CDC prior to his appointment was not defensible.

The public health establishment in this country has not produced results the majority of the American people believe are satisfactory. This is pretty obvious to most Americans and it was clear during COVID that the bureaucracy not only performed poorly but clearly didn’t give a damn about the people.

Which is not to say that the public, and Louisiana’s Republican primary voters in particular, are for breaking down every aspect of public health. It is to say that you aren’t going to hit a home run on this one way or the other.

But Cassidy seems to think that he’s going to win Republican votes by trashing Kennedy.

Well, OK. We’ll see if that works. I’d be shocked if it did.