Bill Cassidy accuses Trump of treating Congress as ‘merely an appendage’

Bill Cassidy, the Republican senator from Louisiana who is being ousted from his position after Donald Trump successfully backed a challenger in May’s primary, has accused the US president of treating Congress as “merely an appendage” in his handling of the Iran war. In an interview on Sunday with CBS News’s Face the Nation, the out-going Cassidy explained his recent face-to-face row with Trump over the president’s failure to brief Congress on the prosecution of the hostilities with Tehran. In a fleetingly rare instance of a Republican politician directly standing up to Trump, Cassidy let rip at a Capitol Hill lunch over the senator’s support for a war powers resolution that was a symbolic rebuke to the White House. After Trump “berated” Cassidy and three other Republican senators who had voted for the resolution, Cassidy let his “Irish temper” get the best of him, he told the political talk show. “I raised my volume to match his,” he said, echoing remarks he had recently made. The cause of his anger, Cassidy said, was that under the separation of powers laid out in the US constitution, Congress had to be briefed. The US’s founding fathers had designed the arrangement “so that there would not be too powerful of an institution of a presidency” and so that it would “reflect all of the American people, not just the will of one person”. …