Louisiana Voice

It’s really curious how some quotes never seem to go out of style.

It’s been a full decade since former Lt. Gov. candidate Caroline Fayard said Republicans eat their own.

Okay, that isn’t the precise quote. Her verbatim OBSERVATION was, “I hate Republicans. They are cruel and destructive. They eat their young. They don’t think. They don’t allow people to think. They are bullies.”

Okay, a tad strong even if, as Fayard later claimed, the quote was taken out of context. It probably came back to bite her three years later when she ran a poor fourth in the 2016 jungle primary for U.S. Senate with only 12 percent of the vote. (The race ultimately went to that Foghorn Leghorn hybrid John Kennedy. But more on him presently.)

Fayard’s observation came home in spades Saturday when the Louisiana Repugnantcan Party, intolerant of any pretense of allowing its members to think, CENSURED one of their own, Sen. Bill Cassidy, on Saturday only hours after he joined six other Repugnantcan senators in voting to convict impeached Donald Trump.

So much for devouring their own. And so much for allowing their members, no matter how loyal they’ve been in the past in toeing the party line, to dare to think for themselves, to put the nation’s interests ahead of the party’s, to even jeopardize their own political future by voting their conscience.

There is little doubt that Cassidy has put his own reelection in peril. Never mind he still has six years to mend political fences before he again goes before the voters. Never mind that his single overriding reason for voting for conviction was that Trump was guilty – something that even minority leader Mitch McConnell who, other than Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham, was undoubtedly the most loyal of Trump loyalists for four years, maintained in his strongly-worded epilog to the impeachment trial fiasco.

The fact is the Louisiana Repugnantcan Party, like the newly-branded Repugnantcan on the national level, is a bully. They did it in Arizona with Cindy McCain, Gov. Doug Ducey and former Sen. Jeff Flake and the Wyoming Repugnantcans did it with Liz Cheney although the national party chose not to strip her as the number 3 Repugnantcan in the House.

McCain and Flake endorsed Biden over Trump in the presidential election. Okay, it’s pretty easy to see why the Repugnantcans might get their panties in a wad over that but Ducey? All he did was sign the certification of Biden’s victory. Well, he did place restrictions on individuals and businesses in an effort to contain the spread of coronavirus.

But back to Cassidy. On Jan. 6, the day that motley throng of insurrectionists descended upon the U.S. Capitol at Donald Trump’s urging, it was Cassidy who, alone among Louisiana’s Repugnantcan delegation, refused to vote to challenge the election by objecting to the certification of a state’s electors.

Let that sink in. Every other Louisiana Repugnantcan congressman took it upon himself to challenge the results of another state’s election results that had already been challenged dozens of times in the courts and those challenges rejected every single time.

Why?

Because the party deemed that they do so. Never mind what the courts, presided over in many cases by Trump appointees, ruled. Never mind what the voters in that state wanted. Never mind what vote recounts had affirmed. Trump wants you to challenge the results, so you’d damned well better do it.

That’s the kind of dictatorial edict one might expect in a totalitarian, one-party-rule country like…oh, say, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, or Nazi Germany.

Cassidy also stood alone among his fellow Repugnantcans from this state in voting that the impeachment trial was legal and constitutional, that great constitutional scholar Jeff Landry’s opinion notwithstanding. But then, remember that Landry played a MAJOR ROLE in the Republican Attorneys General Association’s promotion of that Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. Where was the State Repugnantcan Party in condemning that action? Strangely quiet, that’s where.

Cassidy assuredly knew there would be backlash from those three actions, but he voted his conscience nevertheless.

John F. Kennedy (certainly not John N. Kennedy, make no mistake about that), had several quotes in his book Profiles in Courage that come to mind:

• “A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or reward that quality in its chosen leaders today.”
• “What is now important is the courage he displayed in support of his convictions.”
• “In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience – the loss of friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men – each man must decide for himself the course he will follow.”
• “Today the challenge of political courage looms larger than ever before.”
• “When his regard for himself is so high that his own self-respect demands he follow the path of courage and conscience that all benefit.”

In Act II, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, it is Caesar who says, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

Contrasting Cassidy’s decision to answer to his conscience as it dictated to him the right course to follow in the wake of deliberate insurrection and treason with the Repugnantcan Party’s response to his decision, it’s a simple task to accurately assign the labels of courage and cowardice here.

Suffice it to say the Repugnantcan Party has doomed itself to many such metaphoric deaths.