Senator Cassidy’s betrayal of Americans

To the editor,

Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a gastroenterologist, voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in 2025 despite Kennedy’s years of spreading falsehoods about vaccines and his lack not only of a degree in medicine but his earning a bachelor’s degree in history and literature and not in any scientific field. As recently as last week, in an interview with Dana Bash on CNN, he spouted a series of outrageous lies about the Covid vaccine and insisted completely falsely that the United States’ death rate from Covid was higher than that of any other country. Yet Senator Cassidy has done nothing to try to remove Kennedy from a position in which he has caused great harm, in part by continuing to spout ridiculous lies. Kennedy has been responsible for the significant decline in childhood vaccinations, which has led to a resurgence of measles, which had been virtually wiped out in this country by the year 2000, and has resulted in the greatest number of measles cases in the U.S. in more than three decades.

Senator Cassidy has now betrayed Americans once again, by voting to confirm Todd Blanche as the attorney general of the United States. The senator’s reasons for doing so are breathtakingly nonsensical: first, because, he said, Blanche will be able to oppose the president’s unlawful requests, though to date he has not opposed any of them and has actively worked to indict people innocent of any crime, and second, he said, because if he did not vote to confirm Blanche, the president would probably nominate a worse candidate. A “no” vote would have sent the message that the president must nominate a far more qualified candidate, not a worse candidate. Senator Cassidy will not be returning to the Senate in January because, thanks to the president’s endorsement of his opponent in the primary, he lost his bid for another term. His legacy will forever be severely tarnished by his failures to oppose both Kennedy and Blanche.

MIRIAM LEVINE HELBOK

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