LOUISIANA – When Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy returned home from Washington this week to speak to the Louisiana Legislature he found a cold shoulder from House GOP Caucus Chairman Blake Miguez.
“In case you think we forgot about (Cassidy’s) vote to impeach President Trump, we haven’t,” Miguez told reporters on press row after he was among some Republicans in the chamber who didn’t applaud Cassidy after his speech.
It’s a scene that’s playing out across the country where Trump loyalists are showing they have long memories for those who they consider betrayed the former president during his second House impeachment and ensuing Senate trial in February.
Cassidy was one of six Senate Republicans to join all 50 Democrats voting to convict Trump on Feb. 13 for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, but the former president was acquitted because it takes a two-thirds vote to convict.
Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of 10 Republicans in the House to vote in favor of impeachment, may lose her GOP leadership position because of her continued insistence that Trump lost a fair election.
This week Louisiana U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, the No. 2-ranking Republican in the House, became the first to signal he supports Cheney’s removal from her GOP leadership position.
Cheney, who was censured by her own party back home, wrote a blistering Washington Post editorial Wednesday in which she framed the Republican Party as “at a turning point” in whether it will choose “truth and fidelity to the Constitution” or the “cult of personality” of Trump.
And last week Republican U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, once the GOP nominee for president, was booed and heckled by more than 2,000 Republican delegates at the Utah GOP state convention because of his vote to convict Trump and his continued criticism of the former president.
