The sparkling water at The Monocle always tastes a little crisper when you are sitting across from a man who holds the fate of the American immune system in his hands. Senator Bill Cassidy looked exhausted, carrying the heavy burden of a man who had spent the better part of a week refusing to say whether he believed the nation should have a functioning Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For days, the media had been hounding him. The medical establishment had been whining about "preparedness" and "institutional stability." As the deciding vote on the Senate health committee for Dr. Erica Schwartz’s confirmation as CDC Director, Cassidy had weaponized his silence. He simply declined to say if he would back her.
Sitting across from him as he thoughtfully dissected a lump crab cake, I realized how entirely the pundit class had misread the situation. They called it obstruction. I call it statesmanship.
Let’s be honest: the American people do not want a CDC director who just waltzes into the job on day one with a mandate and a budget. They want a CDC director who has been appropriately humbled, forced to sweat in the anteroom of a junior senator from Louisiana until she remembers who is actually in charge of the pathogens.
You simply cannot hand a federal agency to a highly qualified medical professional without first reminding her that she works for a legislative body that fundamentally resents her expertise.
Cassidy is, of course, a doctor himself. Specifically, a gastroenterologist. And as a man who has spent his career studying the digestive tract, he understands better than anyone that the body politic sometimes requires an artificial blockage to function at its peak. By clogging up the confirmation process, he was performing a vital diagnostic test on the administration's messaging.
Think of the sheer toll this took on the Senator and his staff. While Dr. Schwartz only had to sit by her phone and wonder if her decades of epidemiological experience would be derailed by a backroom temper tantrum, Cassidy’s office had to draft multiple press statements saying absolutely nothing at all. They had to field calls from K Street. They had to look concerned on the dais.
We demand so much of our elected officials, yet we rarely pause to appreciate the agonizing work of manufacturing suspense for a floor vote that was ultimately going to pass anyway.
If we just confirm qualified people the moment they are nominated, what is to stop them from doing their jobs? A CDC director who hasn't been subjected to a meaningless three-day hazing ritual might get the dangerous idea that public health is an objective science, rather than a geopolitical bargaining chip to be traded for favorable committee assignments.
If we rubber-stamp every infectious disease expert who comes across our desks, we lose our ability to hold the federal government's pandemic response hostage for unrelated ethanol subsidies.
When Cassidy finally announced he would support Schwartz, the sigh of relief from the White House was palpable. But the delay had achieved its true purpose. The Senator had proven he possessed the power to decapitate the nation's infectious disease infrastructure, and he graciously chose to merely dangle it over the precipice for a long weekend.
That is not political gamesmanship. That is mercy.
As the waiter cleared our plates and Cassidy allowed me to pick up the check, he checked his phone, presumably to see which mid-level agency deputy he could string along next. I walked out onto Capitol Hill with a renewed sense of security, comforted by the knowledge that the next time a novel virus sweeps the globe, our leaders will take exactly as much time as they need to ensure the optics are right.