# Bill Cassidy — "somebody didn't tell me the truth" > [!quote] "If you want to tell me that somebody didn't tell me the truth, and I should've seen in the future they were not going to tell the truth, you can say, 'Bill, you should've seen into the future.'" > — Bill Cassidy, asked on CNBC's *Squawk Box* whether he regretted his vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., August 13, 2026 ## Context Senator [[Bill Cassidy]] (R-LA), a physician, cast the decisive Finance Committee vote that carried [[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]]'s nomination to lead Health and Human Services. He has said publicly that he did so on the strength of Kennedy's assurance that he would not change the childhood vaccine schedule or the composition of [[ACIP]]. Both assurances failed. Kennedy dismissed the ACIP membership; in January 2026 the government's universal childhood recommendation was narrowed; and on August 10, 2026 the president signed [[Executive Order 14420]], directing states toward a revised schedule and toward separating the MMR vaccine into three single-disease shots that are not commercially available in the United States. Asked three days later whether he regretted the confirmation vote, Cassidy did not say yes. He said he would have needed to see the future. Heather Cox Richardson's letter that day carries a longer rendering with the closing joke attached: *"…in which case I'd be on your show talking about the futures of stocks as opposed to vaccine policy."* ## Why This Matters Cassidy is the vault's clearest single case of the **assurance-based confirmation vote** and what it is worth. He extracted a private commitment in place of a public condition, voted on it, and when the commitment was broken he had no remedy — because the commitment was never an instrument. The quote is valuable precisely because it is not an apology: it reframes a foreseeable outcome as an unforeseeable one, which relocates the failure from his judgment to the calendar. It is also the second Cassidy receipt in the vault of a senator indicting a Trump-administration outcome without indicting his own vote for it — compare [[Bill Cassidy - Reagan is rolling over in his grave]], where the Iran settlement is "the worst foreign policy blunder in decades" and the party's own creed does the accusing. > [!warning] Transcription variance — do not treat any single rendering as canonical > This was a live broadcast answer full of disfluencies, and outlets transcribed it differently. Raw Story (used above) and the widely circulated Aaron Rupar clip agree on the core clause; Daily Kos prefixes it with Cassidy's setup — *"RFK told me he was not going to change the [ACIP]"* — and Richardson's version carries additional filler ("If you're going to tell me I was…, and I should've, like, you know, seen in the future") plus the stock-futures kicker. **The vault has not accessed the CNBC original.** Quote the core clause; attribute any extension to the specific outlet that carried it. ## See Also - [[Bill Cassidy]] - [[Bill Cassidy - Reagan is rolling over in his grave]] - [[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]] - [[ACIP]] - [[Executive Order 14420]]