Two key Republican senators’ votes today on the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be health and human services secretary illustrate the new order of the party under President Donald Trump. Let’s start with Sen. Mitch McConnell, who voted against Kennedy. He’s now the third of Trump’s nominees that McConnell, of Kentucky, the former Senate GOP leader, has opposed on the floor. In the case of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, McConnell was joined by Republican Sens. Susan Collins, of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska. But on Kennedy and newly installed National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, McConnell was the lone GOP dissenter. As the longest-serving Senate leader in history, McConnell developed a reputation for keeping his rank-and-file members in line and frustrating Democrats by relentlessly using procedural tactics to block their agenda, Scott Wong, Sahil Kapur and Frank Thorp V write. Now out of leadership and wrapping up what is likely to be his last term in office, McConnell, 82, is free from the constraints of leadership and the prospect of facing voters again. He has not only voted against a trio of Trump’s high-profile nominees in recent days but also publicly criticized Trump’s tariff plans. At the same time, McConnell, who is using a wheelchair in recent days after he suffered a fall, has lost much of his influence on a Senate Republican Conference that he once managed with an iron grip as he has grown further out of step with the MAGA movement driving the party. McConnell, though, seems unperturbed by going it alone. A Republican senator said McConnell hadn’t been trying to lobby colleagues to join him in opposition to Trump’s nominees, Melanie Zanona reports. And with Hegseth, Gabbard and Kennedy, he didn’t publicly say how he’d vote ahead of time. As a former McConnell aide put it: “I think we’ve reached peak YOLO McConnell.” Sen. Bill Cassidy, however, finds himself in a much different situation. A physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Cassidy, of Louisiana, had publicly struggled with Kennedy’s nomination, specifically his anti-vaccine stances. But Cassidy eventually came around and said he had received enough assurances to vote for Kennedy to lead the country’s most powerful health care agency. A key difference between him and McConnell: Cassidy may have a re-election run in Louisiana on the horizon. He hasn’t formally announced whether he’ll seek another term in 2026, though he has signaled he will. As Bridget Bowman and Natasha Korecki report, problems await. The never-doubt-Trump wing of the Republican Party has yet to forgive Cassidy for voting in 2021 to convict Trump on impeachment charges that he incited the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. And Cassidy already has at least one primary challenger, with others waiting in the wings.
"It’s no secret. It’s going to be a tough primary for him,” Louisiana GOP chair Derek Babcock said. Keep reading below for more on the 2026 Senate map. | 