The United States Department of Defense, an institution that once defined global stability, is an absolute mess of epic proportions. And you can blame 49 GOP senators for this abomination.
The man in charge, Pete Hegseth, has absolutely no business holding the job. And none of this would have likely happened if not for those 49 senators, who were aided in the crime by an equally incapable vice president, whose tie-breaking vote gave Hegseth a title he did not earn.
Among those 49 senators was Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy.
Senate Republicans keep telling us they take “advice and consent” seriously. Their voting record says otherwise. And with Cassidy’s latest capitulation to Donald Trump, another hack, Todd Blanche, has been elevated to a Cabinet position he has no business holding.
So far, the Hegseth confirmation is the gold standard in epic failure, so we shall see how long it takes Blanche to ascend the ranks, although he’ll be hard-pressed to outdo Hegseth’s incompetence.
Hegseth was confirmed by the narrowest of margins, 51-50. It was just the second time in American history that’s been necessary for a Cabinet nominee. The Senate narrowly confirmed Todd Blanche by a near-historic, razor-thin margin that underscores the furious anxiety over placing a former personal defense lawyer at the helm of the Justice Department.
But anxiety about anything related to Trump for GOP Senators is a mere afterthought.
For Hegseth, every Democrat voted no. So did three Republicans: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell, who looked at a nominee trailed by a paid-out sexual assault settlement, a sworn affidavit from his own former sister-in-law about fears for his ex-wife’s safety, and a résumé that topped out at running a small veterans’ nonprofit and hosting weekend cable news, and balked.
Fifty of their colleagues somehow thought Hegseth was a good idea. It’s at once stupid and baffling. Did they really think he’d surprise everyone and turn out to be competent, smart, deferential and, well, normal?
Cassidy was one of those senators.
And he did it again.
Likewise, 51 GOP senators thought there was absolutely nothing wrong with confirming Trump’s Roy Cohn to lead the Justice Department, or what it will now be referred to as: a captive law firm serving only one client.
Cassidy was once again among them.
With that moniker, it’s easy to see why Blanche will give Hegseth a run for his money. But still.
What’s going on at DOD should surprise no one. In fact, I wrote in my previous capacity that he would be a disaster, and he has not disappointed. He’s failed on a scale of epic proportions.
Hegseth has presided over this horrific, ill-advised war with Iran that’s burned through the munitions stockpile. He’s approved defense contracts flowing to Trump’s own sons’ investment funds. He cut roughly 80,000 civilian jobs and denied promotions to qualified Black and female officers, for no reason but their appearances.
That’s exactly what his qualifications predicted would happen. And 50 sycophantic cowards are really to blame for how the military has become a laughing stock around the world.
And I’m not talking about the troops, whose bravery and lives are being put at risk by a novice and inept leader. If you dare criticize Hegseth, even for his silly pocket-square flag, he immediately accuses you of dissing the troops.
In order to overtake Hegseth as the worst of the worst, Blanche will have to surpass another blundering nincompoop.
That would be RFK Jr., who has thrown the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services into the bottom of a metaphorical biohazard waste-material receptacle.
RFK Jr. has no business being our nation’s health secretary. He has zero public health credentials and a long paper trail of medical conspiracy theories, yet was confirmed to run the agency responsible for the nation’s health.
And this is where Cassidy’s record gets particularly hard to explain away.
In his first capitulation, making him Trump’s verifiable confirmation colluder, Cassidy, a doctor, sat across from Kennedy, forced him to admit on the record that vaccines don’t cause autism, voiced real doubts out loud, and voted yes anyway, citing “commitments” from the White House that evaporated the moment the vote was cast.
And just like RFK Jr., Cassidy admitted Blanche “is not perfect.” But he voted yes anyway.
That is not advice and consent. That’s executive fiat. That is surrender. An abdication. It’s lazy, it’s stupid. It’s ruinous.
Cassidy’s deciding vote to confirm Kennedy, who should be in prison or a mental institution, was his first epitaph.
Now, with his vote to confirm Blanche, Cassidy has written a second.
One vote helped put an unqualified conspiracy theorist in charge of the nation’s health. The other helped put Trump’s personal defense lawyer in charge of the Justice Department.
He was the person responsible for making America the sickest country on earth, and now, potentially, the most corrupt.
HHS got a secretary who fights his own scientists. The Pentagon got a man who can’t keep America’s munitions stocked or its promotion boards honest. And now the Justice Department is next in line, headed by a nominee who will go to bat for Trump Every. Single. Time.
And when the damage is done, Cassidy won’t be able to say he didn’t know. He did. He told us he knew. He raised the questions himself. He heard the answers. And then he voted yes anyway.
He now has two dangerous and ominous epitaphs with his votes for Kennedy and Blanche.
And unlike an epitaph carved into his headstone, these will be written in the darkest period in our nation’s history.