By Dan McLaughlin
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has no business heading the largest
department in the federal government. He especially has no business playing
such a major role in a Republican administration. Everyone knows this.
The only question is how many Republican senators have the courage to act on
it. If they want Donald Trump to deliver wins for his voters, they should vote
down RFK Jr.
As so many in his family have done before, Kennedy has
been making the rounds on Capitol Hill this week. Republicans will be asked to
swallow their pride and let an old enemy through the gates of the Department of
Health and Human Services without even asking him who counts as a human
deserving of health. They will get nothing reliable in return. RFK Jr.’s goal
is to remain narrowly on-message and hope nobody is familiar with his record,
his character, or his associations. But these are precisely the things that
senators have always considered in evaluating nominees for Senate-confirmed
offices.
There is no reason to think that he has suddenly become a
completely different man at age 70 than he was four months ago. As recently as
May 2024, Trump himself called RFK Jr. a “Radical Left Liberal” who is “totally
Anti-Gun, an Extreme Environmentalist who makes the Green New Scammers look
Conservative, a Big Time Taxer and Open Border Advocate, and
Anti-Military/Vet.” As Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal notes, Trump at the time said that he would “take Biden
over Junior” and that, under Kennedy, the United States “would collapse
immediately.” “He’s not a Republican, so don’t think you’re going to vote for
him and feel good. He’s a radical left Democrat. Let the Democrats have RFK Jr.
They deserve him.” He elsewhere called Kennedy a “Democratic Plant.” Kennedy,
for his part, has characterized Trump supporters as “belligerent idiots,”
“outright Nazis,” and “spineless fellow travelers.”
There’s no mystery why Trump gave RFK Jr. a prominent
place in his cabinet: He owes him. Kennedy’s late-August decision to drop out
of the race and back Trump may not have been decisive in the 2024 presidential
race, but it undoubtedly added some number of his followers to Trump’s
coalition just as the Trump campaign was struggling to regain its footing after
the Democrats switched candidates. It’s a natural step to reward that.
But most Republican senators owe Kennedy nothing. He
didn’t endorse them. Of the 53 Republicans who will be sitting in the
Senate after January 20, only 15 of them were on the ballot in 2024, and ten of
those won by double digits. That doesn’t even count Ted Cruz, who led in the
polls all year and won by nearly a million votes, or Deb Fischer or Tim Sheehy,
both of whom ran in states Trump won for the third straight time and carried by
over 20 points. Even giving the benefit of the doubt to Dave McCormick and
Bernie Moreno, one would be hard pressed to find any other Republican senators
who could claim with a straight face that they would have lost their elections
without RFK Jr. backing Trump.
A Man of the Left
RFK Jr. is a lifelong man of the Left. By that, I do not
merely mean that he is an ancestral Democrat, literally born into the party’s
royal family a month after his namesake father resigned from working for Joe
McCarthy. Many is the Democrat who kept his or her party registration long
after leaving the party in their hearts. That’s not him. Until the moment he
left the party entirely, nobody conversant in American politics would have
described RFK Jr. as a conservative or moderate Democrat. He is an exile from
his party only in the same sense that Leon Trotsky was.
As far back as his emergence on the national political
scene in the 1990s and as recently as his 2024 campaign for president, Kennedy
was a man of the ideological Left. He’s spent the bulk of his career
espousing left-wing positions, running left-wing activist groups, wallowing in
far-left conspiracy theories about our political and economic system, and
surrounded by a family and social circle that is entirely of the Left. That
includes his left-wing Hollywood environmental-activist wife, Cheryl Hines. As I wrote way back in the distant past of 2023:
Who hired him as an assistant
district attorney? Robert Morgenthau, the legendary Democrat and Kennedy family
loyalist who was U.S. Attorney for the SDNY under John F. Kennedy. What do the
[Natural Resources Defense Council], Salon, and Rolling Stone have in common?
They’re all left-wing outlets or organizations. Who promoted and benefited from
Kennedy’s vaccine theories? The trial bar. . . . The clubbiness of liberal and
progressive journalism, the gauzy gloss it drapes over young and ambitious
Democrats, and the particular culture of Democratic family dynasties (among
whom the Kennedys sit at the top of the pyramid) are all at fault for elevating
and glamorizing such an irresponsible figure.
In 2013, the New York Post described Kennedy’s life as a “world of White House
invitations, falconry, regular television appearances, dinner with Leonardo
DiCaprio and phone calls from Alec Baldwin.” If the simple fact of being a
Kennedy isn’t enough to turn off Senate Republicans, his record should.
That extends specifically to health care, where RFK Jr.
is a Full Bernie fan of socialized medicine. Phil Klein:
He said, “My highest ambition would be to have a single-payer
program,” which he described as one “where people who want to have private
programs can go ahead and do that, but to have a single program that is
available to everybody.” In the original version of Obamacare, the hope of
progressives was that over time, people would gravitate toward a government-run
program that would eventually evolve into a fully single-payer system.
A Man of Low Character
Many of the concerns raised about Pete Hegseth and Matt
Gaetz related to their personal character. RFK Jr. gets more attention for
his public stances, but his personal life suggests the defects of character
that have manifested themselves in his public life.
Kennedy’s first wife committed suicide in 2012 under a cloud of his womanizing and
abandonment:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. grappled with
what he called his biggest defect — “my lust demons” — while keeping a
scorecard of more than two dozen conquests, according to his secret diary. The
thick, red journal was found in their home by his wife, Mary Richardson
Kennedy, who, distraught over their impending divorce and Kennedy’s serial
philandering, committed suicide. . . . [The diary entries] record the names of
women — with numbers from 1 to 10 next to each entry. The codes corresponded to
sexual acts, with 10 meaning intercourse, Mary told a confidant. There are 37
women named in the ledger, 16 of whom get 10s. On Nov. 13, 2001, RFK Jr.
records a triple play. The separate encounters — code 10, 3, and 2 — occur the
same day he attended a black-tie fundraiser at the Waldorf-Astoria. . . .
In 2014, the New York Post reported that he “once kept a list of up to 43 rumored
mistresses in his cellphone. . . . At the time, it appeared Kennedy had a woman
in almost every city, including at least five in Toronto; one in Paris; others
in Palm Beach and Pensacola, Fla.; Alaska; Aspen, Colo.; Miami; Montreal, and
Cleveland.” One may take with a grain of salt the claim by Joe Hagan of Vanity Fair that “he was known to text
other damning images to friends as well — of nude women,” or discount the nanny who says RFK Jr. groped her when she was 23 in
1999, but at this point, that’s just icing on the cake.
If you think Kennedy is a reformed man, consider not only
that he’s a Kennedy (a family rightly notorious for reckless behavior and
womanizing) but also that it was only in September 2024 that the scandal broke
of RFK Jr. exchanging salacious messages with reporter Olivia Nuzzi. Kennedy,
being a Kennedy, walked away; Nuzzi lost her job and remains embroiled in an ugly dispute with her ex-fiancé
featuring a protective order and claims of blackmail.
He was arrested for heroin possession in 1983, after a
decade and a half of using heroin, including while working as a prosecutor for
the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (a job he got through Democratic
connections). Now, there is room in public life for people who have gotten
clean and sober after struggles with addiction, but no well-adjusted person
just casually decides to use heroin. Kennedy claims that it made him a better student, in case you
wonder how credible his health advice is.
Kennedy’s taste for conspiracy theories ranges far and
wide. He has not only questioned the indubitable evidence that his father was
murdered by Palestinian zealot Sirhan Sirhan, he even tried to get Sirhan sprung from prison. That stance was popular with Al Jazeera but was too far to the
fringes even for Gavin Newsom. How credible is it? Sirhan admitted
guilt at the time; he was tackled with the gun in his hand while still
shooting, and his theory of innocence is “coercive hypnosis” implanting a
false memory.
Kennedy was not merely a believer but the chief
proponent of the nutty conspiracy theory that the presidential election of
2004 was stolen from John Kerry by means of Diebold voting machines, a view he
laundered through outlets such as Salon and Rolling Stone. Consider whose side that put him on:
As Democratic Party chairman,
[Terry McAuliffe] ordered a thoroughly bogus forensic “investigation” into
crackpot theories that voting machines had stolen the 2004 election for Bush in
Ohio. . . . Thirty-one Democrats voted,
with no justifiable basis, against certifying Bush’s 2004 election, in which he
won a national popular majority and carried Ohio by 118,000 votes. They
included James Clyburn, now the House majority whip; Maxine Waters, now
chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee; Bennie Thompson, now
chairman of both the House Homeland Security Committee and the House Select
Committee on the January 6 Attack; Raúl Grijalva, now the chairman of the House
Natural Resources Committee; Eddie Bernice Johnson, now the chairman of the
House Science, Space and Technology Committee; Ed Markey, now a senator; John
Conyers, who served as chairman of the House Judiciary and House Oversight
Committees; and John Lewis, who today is the namesake of the Democrats’ current
election bill.
He ought to be asked at hearings whether he still
believes that those Democrats were right to object to George W. Bush’s
electors, despite even the McAuliffe-commissioned report lamely admitting after 200 pages of huffing and puffing about
Republican election perfidy that it found “no reliable evidence of actual fraud
in the use of these machines in Ohio in 2004.”
Enemy of Life
The most obvious and consequential way in which RFK Jr.
is a man of the Left is his longtime support for legal abortion — just like his
Uncle Ted. Right now, in this department, that matters. In theory, the 2022 Dobbs
decision returned the abortion issue to the states. But Joe Biden vowed after Dobbs to bend every lever of federal
executive power to thwart the decision and keep abortion policy in Washington,
and he succeeded on many of those fronts. As Ramesh Ponnuru has observed, “HHS is the largest department in the federal
government, and many issues related to the right to life run through it —
including conscience protections for medical workers who oppose abortion,
research on human embryos and fetuses, and federal health-care programs that
include restrictions on funding abortion that Democrats have been trying to
eliminate.” Should this department be in the hands of a man who supported legal abortion “even if it’s full-term” as
recently as May 2024? A man whose website still
reads:
Mr. Kennedy is a firm supporter of
the principles laid out 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade. For Constitutional and
moral reasons, he believes the decision on whether to continue a pregnancy
should be up to the mother. Roe v. Wade served this country well for 50 years.
Mr. Kennedy supports the judicial principles behind it.
As Alexandra DeSanctis argues:
Instating a pro-abortion HHS
secretary makes it highly unlikely that the incoming administration will make
any progress on reversing the disastrous pro-abortion policies of the Food and
Drug Administration, an HHS agency. Kennedy’s statements about how he would
consider regulating abortion, if at all, suggest he must be entirely supportive
of chemical abortions, which occur earlier in pregnancy. But an essential aim
of a pro-life administration ought to be undoing the FDA’s dangerous changes to
the safety regulations for chemical-abortion drugs. Chemical abortions now
account for about two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S., and while it’s
technically a violation of federal law to send these drugs via the postal
service, loosened FDA regulations have enabled women to obtain them online and
receive them in the mail without ever seeing a health-care professional in
person.
Josh Hawley said
after meeting with RFK Jr. on Tuesday:
We . . . had a good discussion, at
length, about prolife policies at HHS. . . . He committed to me to reinstate
President Trump’s prolife policies at HHS. That includes reinstating the Mexico
City policy & ending taxpayer funding for abortions domestically. . . . He
supports reinstating the bar on Title X funds going to organizations that
promote abortion. . . . He pledged to reverse the Biden Admin’s Section 1557
rule and also said all of his deputies at HHS would be prolife. He told me he
believes there are far too many abortions in the US and that we cannot be the
moral leader of the free world with abortion rates so high. . . . RFK also
pledged to reinstate conscience protections for healthcare providers.
Hawley’s social-media thread did not mention any
discussion of FDA policies on the abortion pill, but he told
a reporter that RFK Jr. was “open” to reinstating the in-person dispensing
requirement for the mifepristone abortion pill: “He said he was open to that.
He indicated to me he wanted to support the president’s pro-life agenda.” It’s
progress that Kennedy is being compelled to make these commitments — pressure
works! — and he should be expected to repeat them under oath and back them up
with Trump appointments of those deputies before Senate Republicans buy these
promises, given how sharply they conflict with his prior record. The problem
with having to extract specific transactional pledges from people to act
against their beliefs, of course, is the need to close off every contingency
that may arise on their watch.
Enemy of Liberty and Law
If RFK Jr. were merely an across-the-board libertarian
skeptic of government and the scientific establishment, one might excuse some
of his more outlandish forays into Just Asking Questions. But he’s been more
than willing to endorse fusing the coercive power of the state with the
white-coated authority of Science™. As David Harsanyi put it:
He’s a Malthusian climate extremist
and authoritarian. And I don’t mean the irritating kind of authoritarian who
wants to force you to ride a bike to an un-air-conditioned solar-panel-factory
union job every morning. I mean the scary kind who would throw you in jail if
you questioned why.
Kennedy once argued that
climate-deniers should be executed. Not all individuals, mind you — he’s not a
monster. “I do, however, believe that corporations which deliberately,
purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given
the death penalty,” Kennedy explained at EcoWatch. Later he walked that
position back to “three hots and a cot at The Hague.”
Among those Kennedy proposed
imprisoning were people who worked at places such as the Cato Institute, the
Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Heartland Institute, the
State Policy Network, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the American
Enterprise Institute.
If he’d had his way, it is likely that many current
Republican senators would be languishing in a Dutch prison today. There’s a
reason why Barack Obama considered putting Kennedy in charge of the EPA and why he
thought doing so would make Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton happy. And “help
endear Obama to liberals.” He was a serial retailer during the Bush years of the same sorts
of lies about deregulation that Democrats routinely deploy against Trump, and
are likely to do again. Kennedy himself, in 2016, accused Trump of pursuing “pollution-based prosperity,” and
commented, “Michael Mann did a great article this week about the 10 worst
climate deniers in the world, the most damaging, most destructive. And Donald
Trump is number one.”
In 2009, under questioning by then-Republican
representative Steve King of Iowa, he endorsed a sentiment quoted to him in 2002 that hog farmers
are a greater threat to Americans than Osama bin Laden on the theory that
“manure and other products associated with large livestock producers emit toxic
wastes that threaten the environment.” Watch him at work:
Enemy of Public Health
Maybe some of RFK Jr.’s flaws don’t relate directly
to the areas within the remit of HHS. But even if one is sympathetic to some of
his causes with regard to processed foods, or to the principle of resisting
vaccination mandates, his record demonstrates that he would be a menace to
public health, in ways likely to lead to outbreaks of infectious disease that
would dominate and destroy Trump’s term.
RFK Jr.’s attacks on the medical establishment are
opportunistic. As in the area of climate science, his preference when possible
is to use the levers of prestigious institutions to spread falsehood. Consider
the case of vaccines and autism. The rise in diagnoses of autism has
legitimately alarmed many Americans, and there is cause for concern even when
one adjusts for the reality that much of that rise has been driven by more
accurate diagnoses of people on the spectrum rather than solely by a rise in cases.
It’s also been more socially visible because we don’t reflexively
institutionalize autistic kids anymore. Parents of autistic children are
understandably desperate for an explanation, given the heavy burdens of raising
such kids. Back in the 1990s, when people were still much more trusting of
medical authority, what RFK Jr. seized upon was a thoroughly fraudulent article
in a prestigious medical journal. As Noah Rothman explains:
He was an avid proponent of former British doctor Andrew Wakefield’s
infamous 1998 study that purported to establish a causal link between the
ubiquitous measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. More than a
decade’s worth of cohort and case-control studies refuted Wakefield’s
findings, but RFK Jr. remained unmoved.
This was simply made up. The Wakefield study, published
in the establishment medical journal The Lancet, used preposterous
methods, as Pradheep Shanker has detailed:
The study, published in the Lancet
and later retracted, was highly flawed from the very beginning. It involved
only twelve children (yes, you read that right), with no control for the
population. As the media and conspiracy theorists quickly latched onto the
fantastic findings of the study, a global scare took off, and parents feared
that the rising number of autism cases was directly related to pediatric
vaccines. An epidemic of diseases such as chicken pox and measles, many of
which were thought to be almost extinct, came about as kids across the world
were not kept up to date on their vaccine schedules. Scientific critics pointed
out that the paper was a small-case series without controls, linked three
common conditions, and relied on parental recall and beliefs. But the damage
had already been done.
It was not until 2011 that the BMJ
(British Medical Journal) declared the original study a fraud. The initial
study was conducted “dishonestly” and “irresponsibly,” and the data were
“bogus.” “Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on
this damaging vaccine scare,” the editors of BMJ said.
Kennedy, predictably, promoted this smear campaign
through his go-to left-wing media accomplices, including Salon, Rolling Stone, and Joe Scarborough,
and his friends in the trial bar, who stood to profit.
Far from surrounding himself today with a reformed crew
of scrupulous pro-lifers and skeptics, the man at Kennedy’s side helping him
pick HHS staff is his lawyer Aaron Siri, who hasn’t just objected to vaccine
mandates; he’s also spearheaded campaigns to get the FDA to withdraw more than a dozen vaccines from the market,
including vaccines for “tetanus, diphtheria, polio and hepatitis A.” (Siri argues that he’s not challenging all of the polio
vaccines.) Trump, for his part, says that he’s “a big believer in the polio vaccine.”
Kennedy’s work can also be seen in demonizing the measles vaccine in
Samoa, and in his organization’s work doing the same in Cape Town at the time
of a measles outbreak there.
Vaccines, like other medications, are a triumph of practical
technology, not the sort of theoretical models that give us climate
hysteria. Their footprints in the real world are as obvious as airplanes,
automobiles, automatic rifles, or air conditioning. George Washington
understood that when he inoculated the Continental Army against smallpox: He
was listening to experience, not to credentialed “experts.” That doesn’t mean
that new or experimental vaccines should blithely be mandated without adequate
testing, but to discount their effectiveness is simply to ignore reality.
Many people raised questions about the Covid vaccines,
some of them more responsible in their critiques than others. His presence in
that popular cause played a big part in winning Kennedy new fans on the right.
But RFK Jr. distinguished himself in his irresponsibility there as well. He
mixed in a heady dose of something darker, claiming that “there is an argument that it is ethnically
targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is
targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune
are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
If Donald Trump wants his administration to veer to the left; persecute skeptics; defend Roe v. Wade, the abortion pill, and single-payer health care; ally itself with lawsuits for profit that enrich Democratic constituencies; and seed outbreaks of totally preventable communicable diseases, Trump has the right guy to run HHS. But Republican senators could do him a favor by keeping RFK Jr. out of that job, because the chances are that Trump doesn’t actually want to be responsible for any of that.
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