Bill Cassidy

This surely isn’t the reaction politicians who send out press releases hope to inspire in journalists, but I have to admit that I found a recent email from U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy kind of … quaint.

It wasn’t the subject matter that inspired this unexpected reaction. There’s nothing whimsical about the $1.35 billion that’s heading Louisiana’s way to support rural broadband, money that enabled Gov. Jeff Landry to break ground last week on the largest Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program project in the country. Cassidy’s press release noted something Landry’s most definitely didn’t — that the money to pay for it came from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the big Biden administration initiative that Cassidy crossed party lines to help negotiate and ultimately pass.

That’s the quaint part: Cassidy still hopes Louisiana voters will give him the credit he’s due.

It’s too late to save his political career. He’s already been a lame duck for nearly five months now, ever since he finished third in the GOP primary Republicans, led by Landry, designed to take him out. The Republican nominee on the ballot for his seat next month will be U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, a vocal proponent of rural broadband who nonetheless voted against the IIJA, but who had the backing of both the governor and President Donald Trump.

Yet with the clock ticking down, Cassidy’s still trying to get in the last word, to write his final chapter. He still wants to remind Louisiana voters that when he had the chance, he delivered for them.

Putting out press releases isn’t all he’s doing.

Cassidy is also using his last months in office to continue pushing a longtime priority, a bipartisan “Big Idea” to shore up Social Security, even if there’s little chance he’ll get anywhere. Congress is basically done until Election Day, and even if the Senate comes back after Nov. 3 to tackle unfinished business, that business will likely focus on enshrining Republican priorities before Democrats take control of the House and possibly the Senate.

For all the ways he’s fallen short — with protecting the nation from Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and his merry band of anti-vaxxers the leading but far from the only example — Cassidy deserves acknowledgement for having done the work, and for still trying to do it even after the state’s GOP voters told him he was no longer wanted.

Just think back to the infrastructure bill’s passage in 2021. Cassidy and a handful of fellow Republicans decided to put aside the politics of giving Biden a big win, looked at what the bill could do for their constituents and used their votes to leverage some big wins, including the broadband money. It’s actually the sort of thing his Democratic predecessor Mary Landrieu used to do. It’s what a lot of Louisiana members of Congress have done, back in the days when the state punched above its weight.

Sure, you could say it’s punching above its weight now, with Mike Johnson serving as House speaker. But Johnson’s never even made a show of putting Louisiana’s interests above Trump’s. Nor, so far, has Letlow, whose campaign allowed the president to take out his revenge on Cassidy for having voted to convict him in his second impeachment.

Letlow may have been talking about the infrastructure vote as well as impeachment when, in announcing her campaign, she argued that “we shouldn’t have to wonder how our senator will vote when the pressure’s on.”

That’s one way of looking at the job. Another is to hope that “our senator” will weigh the facts, consider the state’s needs and vote accordingly. All those voters who will soon have access to broadband in their homes and workplaces should be glad that’s what Cassidy at least sometimes tried to do.

That’s also what makes him kind of a relic in today’s polarized environment. Few politicians even bother anymore, and when they do, voters often don’t connect the dots, pleading press releases notwithstanding.

For six years in the U.S. House and 12 in the Senate, Cassidy has been one of those old-fashioned workhorses that have become endangered in D.C. Even if their constituents don’t quite know it, I suspect plenty will miss them when they’re gone.