Parish GOP leaders censure Cassidy over vote on impeachment
Published 7:00 am Wednesday, February 17, 2021
- Bill Cassidy
Following the lead of the statewide GOP leadership, the Iberia Republican Parish Executive Committee voted over the weekend to censure U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy over his decision to vote in favor of impeaching former Pres. Donald J. Trump.
“It is with deep regret that the Iberia Republican Executive Committee had to take this unprecedented step of censuring Senator Bill Cassidy,” said Iberia Republican Parish Executive Committee Chairperson Heidi Martin Parker. “At the end of the day, we overwhelmingly felt that his position on the advancement of the impeachment articles was in violation of the Constitution of the United States. Further, his vote of guilty lacked the backup of solid evidence. His actions do not reflect the beliefs of the Republican Party in the parish of Iberia or the state of Louisiana.”
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The committee held an emergency meeting for the purpose of passing the resolution officially censuring Cassidy.
The Louisiana Republican Party’s Executive Committee issued its official censure of Cassidy within hours of his vote Saturday in favor of impeaching Trump. He was one of seven Republican senators to cross party lines in support of the impeachment. John Neely Kennedy, the state’s senior senator, voted against the impeachment.
The local resolution for censure refers to both Cassidy’s votes on the constitutional merit of the impeachment and his vote of guilty in favor of Trump’s impeachment.
The committee cited Cassidy’s statement that he supported the side that presented the best argument in the debate over the constitutionality of trying a president after he had left office as grounds for the censure.
In explaining his vote, Cassidy said, “If I’m an impartial juror, and one side is doing a great job, and the other side is doing a terrible job, on the issue at hand, as an impartial juror, I’m going to vote for the side that did the good job.”
The Iberia Parish Republican Executive Committee took that statement to mean Cassidy based his decision on the performance of the lawyers rather than the law to determine his vote.
