Bill Cassidy, the Republican senator from Louisiana who is being ousted from his position after Donald Trump successfully backed a challenger in May’s primary, has accused the US president of treating Congress as “merely an appendage” in his handling of the Iran war.
In an interview on Sunday with CBS News’s Face the Nation, the out-going Cassidy explained his recent face-to-face row with Trump over the president’s failure to brief Congress on the prosecution of the hostilities with Tehran. In a fleetingly rare instance of a Republican politician directly standing up to Trump, Cassidy let rip at a Capitol Hill lunch over the senator’s support for a war powers resolution that was a symbolic rebuke to the White House.
After Trump “berated” Cassidy and three other Republican senators who had voted for the resolution, Cassidy let his “Irish temper” get the best of him, he told the political talk show. “I raised my volume to match his,” he said, echoing remarks he had recently made.
The cause of his anger, Cassidy said, was that under the separation of powers laid out in the US constitution, Congress had to be briefed. The US’s founding fathers had designed the arrangement “so that there would not be too powerful of an institution of a presidency” and so that it would “reflect all of the American people, not just the will of one person”.
Set against that founding vision, Cassidy accused Trump of acting “as if Congress is merely an appendage, and frankly, sometimes Congress acts like it’s an appendage”.
The senator added that he had “accomplished the mission” in that following the blazing row Trump conceded and granted him a briefing on the war from Vice-President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff. Having received that audience, Cassidy dropped his support for the war powers resolution.
Nonetheless, Cassidy’s plain spoken comments to Face the Nation indicate that the senator remains emboldened having effectively been chucked out of the Senate seat he has occupied since 2015. On Saturday, Julia Letlow, the challenger Trump backed in May’s Republican primary, won a runoff election and is now in pole position to replace Cassidy in November’s general election.
Cassidy, who demonstrated his independent streak when he voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges over his supporters’ US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021, had strong words over how the president’s second term was going. He questioned Trump’s domestic priority of passing the Save America Act that would introduce new federal voting restrictions, saying that he should be focused instead on “how we make life more affordable for the average American”.
He said: “If I were president, I’d be focused on what a family around the kitchen table is looking at as they go through their bills. … How do you make their life better?”
On the Iran war, Cassidy was critical of what he suggested was the Trump administration’s failure to meet its initial objectives. “The fact is that a medium-sized power at this point is perceived to have fought a superpower to a draw,” he said, adding that the conflict had so far cost $29bn and claimed 13 American lives.
A more upbeat assessment was given on NBC’s Meet the Press by Cassidy’s fellow Republican senator Roger Marshall. “I don’t think the war is over [but] we’re making great progress,” Marshall, of Kansas, said. “So I’m asking America to hang in there.”
In his interview, Cassidy also made threatening noises over the confirmation process for the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, in which the senator is likely to wield a key vote. He has been among a group of Republican senators who have vented fury at justice department attempts to set up a $1.8bn so-called “weaponization fund” to pay Trump’s allies – as well as a move to permanently shield the president and his family from IRS audits.
“I absolutely object to that,” Cassidy told CBS News. “Leaders should be held to a higher standard, not a different standard. They should be more accountable … I would object to anything that goes against the spirit of that, and making one person above the law is wrong.”
