During President Donald Trump’s decade leading the Republican Party, it’s been proved over and over that if you want a job in GOP politics, you need to be almost completely in line with him.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) is the latest example. He just lost his primary,after voting five years ago to convict Trump at the president’s impeachment trial after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. (Senators serve six-year terms, so this was Cassidy’s first time on the ballot since then.)
But Cassidy also suggested he was going to not finish his term quietly.
And he’s not the only GOP senator routinely speaking out against Trump, who is facing abysmal approval numbers ahead of November’s midterm elections, in which Republicans’ control of Congress is on the line.
Here’s who to watch.
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Cassidy: ‘You don’t pout’
Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, playing a role in a historic rebuke from the president’s own party. Trump was impeached by the House but acquitted after a trial in which 57 senators voted to find him guilty of inciting the insurrection, short of the 67 needed to convict him.
“Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person,” Cassidy said at the time. “I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.”
When Trump returned to office, Cassidy was in the crosshairs again. A doctor, he struggled over whether to cast the deciding vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the nation’s top health official. Cassidy ultimately did, but as Kennedy has systematically rolled back vaccine recommendations, the senator has warnedthat vaccines will be less available and more children will get sick.
When he lost his primary this weekend, Cassidy gave a concession speech illustrating an alternate vision of the Republican Party.
“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to,” he said. “But you don’t pout. You don’t whine. You don’t claim the election was stolen.”
Thom Tillis: ‘I’m sick of stupid’
Thom Tillis is a senator from North Carolina who announced last summer that he wasn’t going to run for reelection and then opposed Trump’s tax bill because of its cuts to Medicaid.
Since then, Tillis has colorfully criticized Trump’s Cabinet secretaries (“The United States is not a warmonger,” he told NBC News of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth) and the administration’s proposition to invade Greenland (“I’m sick of stupid,” he said). He blocked Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve until he got assurances that the Justice Department would set aside a criminal investigation of the current Fed chair.
Tillis is also standing in the way of Trump’s push to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate so Republicans can approve a bill to change how Americans vote, calling it “a foolish and lazy idea.”
Like Cassidy, Tillis is not so subtly criticizing how Trump has changed American politics to be more tribal.
“It’s become increasingly evident,” Tillis said as he announced his retirement from Congress, “that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.”
Mitch McConnell: ‘What gives?’
In Trump’s first term, Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), then the Senate leader, was instrumental in helping the president transform the Supreme Court to a heavily conservative one.
But then the Jan. 6 attack happened. “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell said on the Senate floor after the attack. “No question about it.”
But he did not vote to convict Trump, which helped enable Trump’s comeback four years later.
McConnell has since stepped down from the top Senate position and is retiring next year. He’s voted against confirming some of the president’s most controversial Cabinet picks — an unthinkable prospect in Trump’s first term. And he is fervently pressing the administration to fund Ukraine so it can defend itself against Russia’s invasion, pointing out that the Defense Department hasn’t spent millions that Congress approved for the battlefield. “What gives?” he wrotein The Washington Post last month.
The Republican primary in the race to replace McConnell is Tuesday, and his reputation is taking a beating among Republicans trying to succeed him.
None of these senators will be in office much longer
That’s also true for two House lawmakers who have spoken out more publicly against Trump: Rep. Don Bacon (Nebraska), who is retiring, and former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia), who abruptly announced she was leaving Congress last year and has since called for the Cabinet to remove Trump from office through the 25th Amendment.
That will almost certainly not happen.
Mike Madrid, a leader of the Never Trump movement, said that after all these years of opposing the president, he doesn’t see an organized Republican resistance to Trump. “Very few of the Never Trumpers call themselves Republicans anymore,” he told The Washington Post recently, “or are fighting for conservatism anymore, and that’s very telling.”
The post The Republican senators speaking out against Trump appeared first on Washington Post.
