17 May—Louisiana Republicans demonstrated their lack of judgement and principle as well as their ovine docility and sheer stupidity yesterday by effectively ending the political career of Republican U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy in favor of a person endorsed by Donald Trump. Dr. Cassidy, a gastroenterologist, isn’t perfect, mind you.

In February 2020, for instance, Cassidy voted to acquit Trump on both articles of his first impeachment—abuse of power and obstruction of Congress—both of which the scumbag-in-chief clearly was guilty of. But a year later, in a questionable post-presidential impeachment intended to foreclose another term for Trump, Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict the then-former scumbag-in-chief on the single charge of incitement of insurrection.

“Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty,” Dr. Cassidy declared solecistically—unless the Constitution and the country are construed as an inseparable single entity. But why quibble?

So that’s the vote—and comment—that pissed off Trump. Of the seven principled Republican senators, four—Richard Burr of North Carolina, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania—chose to retire rather than subject themselves to pretty certain electoral defeat by Trump diatribe.

The three others are Bill Cassidy, of course, who has just suffered Trump’s wrath; Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who was reelected in 2022 despite Trump’s endorsement of her opponent in the state’s ridiculous ranked-choice voting, which may be repealed; and Susan Collins of Maine, who wasn’t challenged in a GOP primary but may be unseated by an antisemitic oyster-farming Democrat in an election that likely won’t involve the state’s ridiculous ranked-choice voting.

On the subject of impeachment, yesterday’s Hearst RepublicanAmerican informed readers that “On this date in 1868 having already been impeached by the House of Representatives, President Andrew Johnson narrowly avoided impeachment by the Senate, which voted 35-19 in favor of impeachment—one vote shy of the required two-thirds majority.”

Sure. Except that Johnson didn’t in fact avoid impeachment by the Senate. He only avoided conviction by the Senate—essentially the jury—after an 11-week trial for violating the Tenure of Office Act—technically, for high crimes and misdemeanors—which required Senate approval for a president to fire executive officials and had been passed in 1867 over Johnson’s veto.

The Tenure of Office Act was repealed in 1887. Even worse, in 1926 the Supreme Court ruled (in Myers v. United States) that laws requiring Senate consent to remove executive branch officials were in violation of Article II of the Constitution. The separation of powers have been a constitutional bugbear ever since and the SCOTUS troglodyte majority is currently looking for a way to rationalize Donald Trump’s firing of anyone he doesn’t like for any reason.

And while on history, bet you didn’t know that on 17 May in “1787 37 American sailors were killed when an Iraqi warplane attacked the U.S. Navy frigate Stark in the Persian Gulf. (Iraq apologized, called it a mistake, and paid more than $27 million in compensation.)”

That’s what the Hearst RepublicanAmerican tells us. In all events, we must give credit to the Iraqis where it’s due, because the Montgolfiers and Benjamin Franklin were still flying in balloons in the 1780s. And even though $27 million in 1787 would be worth about a billion today, the Iraqis still got away cheap—and with murder . . .