Don't worry about Bill

#NeverForget pic.twitter.com/5OyfiIkgnt

— Bill Cassidy’s Mardi Gras Beads (@BillGras) October 4, 2020

Oh noooo Bill Cassidy voted to convict Trump in a meaningless gesture where the outcome was foreordained and is getting "harsh backlash" from Louisiana Republicans  

Almost immediately after his vote to convict, Louisiana Republicans blasted Cassidy. Attorney General Jeff Landry said the vote was “extremely disappointing,” calling the impeachment trial unconstitutional. He said Cassidy fell into a “trap laid by Democrats to have Republicans attack Republicans.”

Mike Bayham, the secretary of the LAGOP, said he hopes the Legislature will revamp the state’s election system to hold closed primaries, which he believes will result in more reliable Republican candidates. Currently, all candidates for office appear on the same ballot regardless of party, in what's known as a jungle primary.

“Bill Cassidy is a senator without a party as of today,” he said.

It would be a shame if the Republicans, who do control the legislature after all, decide to scrap the jungle primary over this.  It's one of the few good things about Louisiana's electoral system. But more likely nobody will remember any of this in six weeks, let alone the six years before Cassidy is up for reelection again.  By that time, the ever expanding Republican right wing will have found a new mode of expression beyond the personality of Donald Trump and Cassidy will just as likely be positioned relative to it in a way that rides that wave along with the rest of them. 

Because the thing to understand about the difference between the Republican right wing and the rest of the Republican Party is that there isn't any.  Regardless, wealthy liberals and corporate media institutions are going out of their way right now to pretend that there is some sort of schism between the "educated" Republicans and the crazy ones.  Here, for example, we see Nancy Pelosi repeating and expounding on a line that she has pushed for a few years now and Joe Biden has repeated.  America "needs a strong Republican Party" for some reason. Why? It's probably true that the Democrats enjoy the convenient excuse for not delivering things they promise to their voters.  But the country has had a strong Republican Party for decades and look where that got us. 

Really, though, the Democrats who pine for it are telling on their own class biases.  Here is Pelosi talking about candidate recruitment.  

When we recruit candidates to run for office or we see them self-recruiting, we always say or we see them saying, well I could be the president of my university or the head of my hospital department or this or that so I have to think about whether I have to run for Congress, we always say we don't want people without options that's why we are looking to you to run. Because you have options.

You see, ideally, the republic is guided by university presidents and heads of hospitals as opposed to, say, bartenders or nurses who become civil rights activists. We can't trust those people because their "options" are limited. Remarkably, she's talking there about who the Democrats - the ostensible party of the people - envision for their party's leadership.  Specifically she means to contrast this with the GOP where we are meant to understand that the rubes have taken over.  But this isn't just about Pelosi's hostility toward poor and working class Americans' material stake in or aptitude for engaging with political outcomes. It's about the fundamental lie she and other like minded observers are telling about what's keeping us from enjoying the benefits of a "strong Republican Party" right now.  

A recent New Republic column by Osita Nwanevu written after the House voted to strip Marjoire Taylor Green of her committee assignments, talks about how conspiracy theories like QAnon are frequently mischaracterized as merely a consequence of ignorance on the part of their adherents. 

Of all the “big lies” distorting our politics, one of the largest and most popular—back in 2010 and now—has been the notion that our political divisions are the product of under- or miseducation. The Republican Party’s flight into lunacy, it’s often suggested, has a fairly simple cause. The unwashed aren’t getting The Facts in school or from their media sources, and it’s up to the enlightened to shower The Facts upon them—perhaps, as some “disinformation” experts recently suggested to The New York Times, with a “reality czar” at the White House manning the hose. This was the explanation many turned to as the Trump era began, and it was the explanation many turned to for how it ended. 

But this doesn't actually describe most conspiracy-minded Republicans. Or, at least, according to this Atlantic article Nwanevu cites, it doesn't describe the kind of people who stormed the Capitol in January. 

The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.

Looks like more than a handful people who "have options" there. Not that any of this should surprise anyone.  The Republican Party has long been and is still a party of the ruling class establishment.  Its radical movements are not subversive challenges to that establishment, they are establishmentarian reactions to progress.  

Democrats will still occasionally refer to voters' inherent understanding of this when it's convenient for them. But, as Democrats have become more dominated by ruling class interests themselves, those moments are less frequent.  A party that depends on finance capital for its funding and college educated white collar professionals for its electoral strategy is less likely to cast itself as oppositional to the elites in the other party.  Instead, they have to build a classist myth of paper "deplorables" to run against.  Whether or not one finds that strategy effective depends on what we assume are its goals.  If we think the point is to maintain the sinecures and fundraising streams maintained by the career pols and staffers embedded in the party infrastructure, it's been a smashing success. If we think the idea should be to actually halt or even resist slightly the country's inexorable decades long march further and further to the right, then the results have been less good. 

Nwanevu appears to be giving them the benefit of the doubt in offering this advice.

Democrats should try campaigning on the truth: The Republican Party is controlled by intelligent, college-educated, and affluent elites who concoct dangerous nonsense to paper over a bigoted, plutocratic agenda and to justify attacks on the democratic process. That agenda and those attacks are supported by millions of reasonably intelligent voters who will believe or claim to believe anything that furthers the objective of keeping conservatives in control of this country forever. Simply pointing to figures like Greene and hoping the indignation of college graduates will do the rest is a mistake. Instead, Democrats should present voters with a material choice between a party that has nothing to offer the majority of Americans but abuse and conspiratorial flimflam and a party committed to building a democracy and an economy that work for all. If they don’t, the lizard people who run the GOP will be running the government again in no time.

If the Democrats truly were a party "committed to building a democracy and an economy that work for all," they would be well served to take this advice. But assuming this much good faith on their part has become so absurdly fruitless an exercise that even going this far into the act of pointing it out is boring. So forget trying to convince them of anything.  What readers should take away from Nwanevu's analysis, though, is that it is possible for smart, educated people to believe in and pursue evil politics. The "we need a strong Republican Party" wing of the Democrats don't want to acknowledge this because they, too, believe in and pursue evil politics with a different branding. But justifying their kind of evil depends on the false idea that education/expertise automatically equals morality.

Bill Cassidy has a lot of education and expertise. He is, in fact, a medical doctor.  Before he cast his meaningless vote to hypothetically convict Trump, he directed that education and expertise toward the defense of the petro-chemical corporations who regularly poison Louisiana residents while funding his campaigns. 

President Joe Biden’s recent utterance of “Cancer Alley” has raised the hackles of Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy. The Baton Rouge Republican said the president’s use of the term, rooted in longstanding concerns about toxic air pollution in the industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, was an insult against Louisiana.

“I'm not going to accept that sort of slam upon our state,” Cassidy said in a call with reporters Tuesday. “It sounds like great rhetoric. But again, I don't accept that slam."

In 2017 Doctor Cassidy's proposed "repeal and replace" scheme for gutting the Affordable Care Act would have resulted in massive cuts in Medicaid care for the most vulnerable patients.

Critics of Cassidy's proposals, though, said that amounts to a substantial cut in the Medicaid funding that would jeopardize care for the elderly, disabled and low-income residents in Louisiana.

Jan Moller, director of the Louisiana Budget Project, which advocates on behalf of low- and moderate-income families in the state, said the cuts in the Cassidy-Graham-Heller bill would leave states scrambling to cover inflating costs.

"This would rip a large and growing hole in our state budget while eliminating all guarantees of assistance for low-income residents," said Moller, whose group has actively opposed other recent Republican proposals to replace the Affordable Care Act.

His 2020 family leave proposal has been described as a "Trojan horse" bill that would push more families into bankruptcy. 

Some policy researchers have criticized this plan as tantamount to a loan that working families will have to pay off with reduced tax credits in the future.

Kathleen Romig notes that this policy will have no actual protections for employees seeking to take time off, so many workers in service sectors would risk losing their jobs entirely. Romig also points out that the details are sparse on how this plan would cover costs for low-income workers. By front-loading the child tax credit, they would be sacrificing their tax credits on income tax returns for years to come.

“The bill thus provides no net new financial help for families,” she wrote in an article for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “In effect, it is a loan that families would repay during some of a family’s most financially crunched years. . . . Families who took this ‘advance’ would have to repay it for ten or 15 years.”

And who could forget Cassidy's most startling breach of the trust we are meant to place in our experts when, during a 2018 Fox News segment, the Senator from Louisiana demonstrated an alarming lack of understanding of how a jambalaya is prepared.  

While Mike Bayham might declare that Cassidy is "a senator without a party as of today," his consistent record of support for conservative causes and hostility toward the poor suggests that six years from now he will probably be as welcome as ever in either party.  Or to put it another way, he's not exactly someone "without options."