The Congressman from the 6th District is Republican Bill Cassidy, one of only five Republicans to defeat a House Democratic incumbent in the Democratic year of 2008. The son of a life-insurance salesman, Cassidy grew up in Baton Rouge and went to college at Louisiana State University. He went on to graduate from LSU’s medical school, and during his medical training, he met his wife, Laura, who is also a physician and former chief of surgery at Earl K. Long Hospital. Cassidy was an associate professor of medicine at LSU and taught at the same hospital. He went on to cofound the Greater Baton Rouge Community Clinic, which provides free dental and health care to the working uninsured. He developed a school-based hepatitis B vaccination program that has immunized more than 36,000 public, private, and parochial schoolchildren at no cost to parents or schools. Read More

The Congressman from the 6th District is Republican Bill Cassidy, one of only five Republicans to defeat a House Democratic incumbent in the Democratic year of 2008. The son of a life-insurance salesman, Cassidy grew up in Baton Rouge and went to college at Louisiana State University. He went on to graduate from LSU’s medical school, and during his medical training, he met his wife, Laura, who is also a physician and former chief of surgery at Earl K. Long Hospital. Cassidy was an associate professor of medicine at LSU and taught at the same hospital. He went on to cofound the Greater Baton Rouge Community Clinic, which provides free dental and health care to the working uninsured. He developed a school-based hepatitis B vaccination program that has immunized more than 36,000 public, private, and parochial schoolchildren at no cost to parents or schools.

Cassidy had a defining moment when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. With the help of several other physicians, he created a makeshift field hospital in an abandoned Kmart store. In a PBS documentary, he recalled entering the store after the storm to find complete ruin: grease all over the floor, no electricity and no phone lines. In two days, he and the others transformed the space to be ready to receive patients. Cassidy won a December 2006 special election to the state Senate and was re-elected in 2007. He sponsored several bills to improve health standards in Louisiana, including one to overhaul the children’s mental health system and another to expand Medicaid coverage to patients at new organ-transplant centers.

When GOP Rep. Richard Baker resigned his seat to head a Washington trade group, Cassidy passed on the opportunity to compete in the May 2008 special election. But after state Rep. Don Cazayoux defeated social conservative Woody Jenkins 49%-46%, with a big boost from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, to win the seat in the special election, Cassidy vowed to take the district back for the Republicans in the regularly scheduled congressional election in November 2008.

In the campaign, Cassidy described himself as a “pro-life, pro-gun-rights” social conservative in favor of free enterprise, limited government, and lower taxes. He made the economy his focus, highlighting his record in the state Senate of voting against spending bills and cutting taxes for businesses and for parents with children in private schools. He also criticized Cazayoux for supporting Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s tax plan. Cazayoux ran an ad criticizing Cassidy for supporting the idea of private savings accounts in the Social Security program. State Rep. Michael Jackson, who is African-American, ran as an independent, due partly to his unhappiness over the national Democrats’ early support for Cazayoux in the special election.

Cassidy won comfortably, with 48% to 40% for Cazayoux and 12% for Jackson. In East Baton Rouge, which cast 62% of the total vote, Cassidy won 44%-42%. His margin of victory came in Livingston and Ascension parishes, which he won by more than 27,000 votes. Two years later, without an opponent as strong as Cazayoux and in a far better year for the GOP, Cassidy coasted to re-election with 66% of the vote.

In the House, Cassidy is a reliable conservative vote and was made a part of the GOP leadership’s whip team to help round up votes. He backed the House Republican earmark ban and did not request any earmarks for himself in 2009, citing a lack of transparency in the process. Instead, he and Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., introduced a bill seeking to put all earmarks in a searchable, public database. He was one of four Republicans on the Agriculture Committee to support a proposal in 2010 to end the ban on American travel to Cuba and ease regulations on sales of U.S. agricultural products there. Like the rest of his state’s delegation, Cassidy has been an ardent advocate of the oil and gas industry. When the Natural Resources Committee approved a 2010 measure to overhaul federal management of energy as a response to the BP oil spill, Cassidy unsuccessfully tried to amend the bill to push back the effective date of most of the legislation until the Interior secretary certified it would not result in higher energy costs or increased unemployment.

As a physician, Cassidy regularly criticized Democratic approaches to health care and said government should step out of the way of patients. “The key to expanding access is lowering costs,” he wrote in one op-ed column. “The key to lowering costs is empowering patients.” After the House GOP takeover in November 2010, he expressed interest in emulating the 1996 welfare law for the Medicaid program, which he said offers “the appearance of coverage without the power of access.”