BATON ROUGE, La.: Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana joined Democrats in voting against ending Donald Trump’s impeachment trial Tuesday, a surprise reversal that Cassidy said was a response to the former president’s lawyers doing a terrible job of arguing their case.
Cassidy was among six Republican senators who sided with Democrats on the question of whether a former president can be tried after leaving office. The Louisiana senator’s position was a switch from January, when he voted to end the proceedings on the grounds that they were unconstitutional.
The vote drew swift criticism from Republicans in the senator’s deeply conservative state. But Cassidy said Trump’s attorneys didn’t make their case. While the Democrats’ impeachment managers were focused, they were organized, relying on precedent and legal scholars, Trump’s team was disorganized, random, had nothing,” he said.
“They talked about many things, but they didn’t talk about the issue at…