MAHA Goes to War Against the Senator Who Let RFK Run the Health Agencies

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) has never quite fit in with the ever-growing contingent of MAGA lawmakers on Capitol Hill who show blind loyalty to the president. He is one of the few Senate Republicans who have publicly and repeatedly criticized President Donald Trump for his actions, though he has not always backed up that criticism with votes.

But in one career-defining case, he did. He was one of seven Republicans — ultimately not enough — who voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. 

At the time of that vote, Cassidy had just been reelected. Trump’s faithful would have to wait six years to express their ire at the ballot box. Those six years are up.

Yet as Louisiana’s May primary approaches, there’s another problem for Cassidy, who is also a physician. He has run afoul of Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who commands his own, loyal Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, overlapping with, but distinct from, MAGA.

MAHA’s dislike of Cassidy is despite the fact that the senator, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pension (HELP) Committee, was the pivotal vote that guaranteed Kennedy’s confirmation to lead the HHS in early 2025. While initially skeptical — due to Kennedy’s long-time anti-vaccine stance — Cassidy ultimately voted to confirm Kennedy to lead the nation’s health agencies after getting promises and assurances from him that he would not use his position to enact policies in line with his own beliefs in conspiracy theories, largely around vaccines and vaccine safety.

But despite those promises, Kennedy’s first year in office was filled with controversial changes to government policy on well-known and accepted scientific concepts, causing Cassidy to publicly call out and denounce him and his stance on multiple occasions.

That has mobilized Kennedy’s fans. 

“Over the last decade, Republicans who have failed to embrace the gift of the MAGA movement have had their political careers meet an untimely demise because they failed to connect with the new Republican coalition built by President Trump,” Tony Lyons, a leading MAHA activist, wrote in a memo shared with the press this month, urging Republican leadership to use MAHA talking points to win elections. “Republicans serving now shouldn’t make the same mistake and fail to embrace the new gift of the MAHA movement.”

The memo didn’t mention Cassidy, but Lyon’s PAC, MAHA action, recently endorsed Cassidy’s primary challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA), and pledged $1 million to defeat Cassidy.

​”He’s facing kind of a double whammy,” Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, a group that advocates for lawmakers to expand access to health care, told TPM. “He’s got the MAGA that hates him because he voted to impeach Trump. And he’s got MAHA that’s out to get him because he’s had the temerity to speak out against some of the crazy stuff that RFK Jr. has done.”

The MAGA movement’s dislike of the two term senator — who was sworn in for his first term in January 2015 — goes beyond the impeachment vote. Cassidy also publicly said in 2023 that he thought Trump should drop out of the 2024 presidential election in the face of indictments; Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against the president for mishandling classified documents was “almost a slam dunk,” he said. After Trump secured the GOP nomination for the presidential election, the Louisiana senator publicly refused to endorse him.

In January, Trump endorsed Letlow for the Senate seat Cassidy currently holds — a seat Letlow had not yet announced she was running for. Days later, Letlow got into the race, attracting both MAHA and MAGA’s support.

“MAHA is all in for LETLOW!” she posted on social media this month, celebrating Lyon’s PAC’s endorsement. “I’m thrilled to have the support of the MAHA PAC in my run for U.S. Senate as we confront the chronic disease epidemic and stand with President Trump to Make America – and Louisiana – Healthy Again.”

On top of Trump, “if MAHA is also attacking Bill Cassidy or taking a position against him, I think probably Bill Cassidy is in a lot of trouble,” Woodhouse said.

Cassidy’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“The Republican party is renting MAHA voters. They haven’t decided to purchase them yet,” Lyons wrote in his memo, which was addressed to leaders of the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. “We need to convince every Republican to buy into the MAHA movement, just like Trump has.”

Prior to his confirmation, Kennedy assured Cassidy that he would maintain the recommendations from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without any changes. But in June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the ACIP and replaced them with individuals of his own choosing, including some vaccine skeptics.

Kennedy also promised Cassidy that he would not remove statements on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) website that stated unequivocally that vaccines do not cause autism. But the site was updated in November to suggest, without evidence, that possible links between vaccines and autism were “ignored.” Cassidy was quick to denounce the changes. 

Cassidy has also been vocal about Kennedy and his team’s significant revisions to the childhood vaccine schedule, reducing the number of routine shots dramatically, and the push to link the use of Tylenol by pregnant women to autism in kids.

Now his initial hesitation to confirm RFK Jr. combined with several public clashes on decisions by the Kennedy led agencies are becoming a focal point of Cassidy’s re-election campaign against Letlow and several others who have thrown their names in the running.  

This year, Louisiana will be holding closed party primaries — a change from its previous open primaries, where candidates of all affiliations faced each other in an initial election. That means the candidate with the majority of votes from each party will advance to the midterm election. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote in, for example, the GOP primary, a party runoff will be held the following month between the top two Republicans. 

“From a statistical standpoint a closed primary favors Trump because you immediately remove a million people who could vote but won’t vote or can’t vote. That is the million registered Democrats in Louisiana who might want to meddle in this race,” David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, told TPM. 

“The election process has changed to the benefit of Trump,” he continued. 

If there were Democrats back in the day who preferred Cassidy to Letlow, they could strategically vote for Cassidy rather than, say, the Democrat they might otherwise have chosen. That is no longer the case, Paleologos explained. Independents can still vote but there’s less incentive for them to vote in the primary.

“The signals are all there that he needs to be more Trump-like in his approach here,” Paleologos said, referring to Cassidy. “Because the universe of people who can vote are largely MAGA.”

Seemingly aware of the MAHA discontent and the need to appeal to the Trump base in his state, Cassidy unveiled a proposal last Tuesday aimed at modernizing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

The 18-page proposal lays out ways in which Congress can legislate and change how the agency regulates and approves products, including making it easier to get low-cost generic drugs to market and “strengthening FDA’s Human Food Program” to deliver “President Trump’s goal of ending the chronic disease epidemic in America.” 

Trump, of course, also recently unveiled a light-on-details two-page plan to lower the cost of prescription drug prices. Cassidy did seemingly embrace part of that plan and at the time said he would take “action” on some of the president’s proposals.

Cassidy’s proposal also scrutinized the FDA’s lack of oversight around reviewing the safety of food ingredients. Kennedy recently discussed the same issue in an interview with “60 Minutes,” claiming that FDA’s current system includes a “loophole” that results in the agency not knowing “how many ingredients there are in American food.”