[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 29 (Wednesday, February 12, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S944-S947]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NOMINATION OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.
Mr. WELCH. Madam President, turning back to the topic at hand--a
serious question for all of us. The Health and Human Services Secretary
plays a vital role in the well-being of every citizen in this country
and is extraordinarily powerful in every respect. It has to do with
science, medical research, cancer cures. It has to do with the delivery
of healthcare and trying to deal with the very complex and very
expensive healthcare system we have. It has to do with trying to create
priorities for the administration of our healthcare system.
I think all of us, every single one of us, takes very seriously the
advice and consent constitutional responsibility that we have when it
comes to voting on a Presidential nominee.
I start out with the proposition that a newly elected President is
entitled to the benefit of the doubt, so my beginning position is my
hope that I can be supportive. But saying that I want to
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give the benefit of the doubt to the President, Republican or
Democratic, is different than saying I want to give a blank check.
So how do we decide--or at least I will say how do I decide about a
yes or no? It is three matters for me. One is character, one is
competence, and one is their priorities. So character, competence, and
priorities.
Now, character is a difficult issue to assess, and I think all of us
are reserved when it comes to making an opinion or judgment on the
character of another person. There are a lot of reasons anyone does
whatever it is they do, and all of us have mistakes that we have made
along the way. But difficult as it is, that is a factor that I believe
a U.S. Senator has to take into account, exercising her or his best
judgment about the character qualifications of the person who is
presented to us.
So rather than go through my own reading and assessment of Mr.
Kennedy's character, I want to read a letter from his cousin Caroline
Kennedy, who has known him all his life.
You know, it was a painful letter for her to write. She videotaped it
as well. But it was a letter that, out of great sincerity and a great
sense of concern about the well-being and the healthcare of the
citizens of this country, she felt obligated to share.
She is a very private person. Her family, as we all know, has
suffered great loss and provided great service. She lost her father.
She lost her uncle. She lost her other uncle. There has been a lot of
hardship that has been reported for many of the Kennedys.
I am happy to be a great admirer of the family. I am from
Massachusetts. John F. Kennedy was somebody who inspired me to think
about going into politics and public service.
I say that by way of introduction because this letter that Caroline
Kennedy sent to Senator Crapo, the Finance Committee chair, and Senator
Wyden, the ranking member, and Senator Cassidy and Senator Sanders, the
chair and ranking member of the HELP Committee, was clearly hard to
write but heartfelt and, as I said earlier, reflected a deep and
abiding commitment that she felt to provide relevant information to
those of us who have to take a vote on Mr. Kennedy. Let me read her
letter:
Throughout the past year, people have asked for my thoughts
about my cousin, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and his presidential
campaign.
I did not comment, not only because I was serving in a
government position as United States Ambassador to Australia,
but because I have never wanted to speak publicly about my
family members and their challenges. We are a close
generation of 28 cousins who have been through a lot
together. We know how hard it has been, and we are always
there for each other.
But now that Bobby has been nominated by President Trump to
be Secretary of Health and Human Services, a position that
would put him in charge of the health of the American people,
I feel an obligation to speak out.
Overseeing the FDA, the NIH, the CDC, and Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services--agencies that are charged
with protecting the most vulnerable among us--is an enormous
responsibility, and one that Bobby is unqualified to fill. He
lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or
medical experience. His views on vaccines are dangerous and
willfully misinformed. These facts alone should be
disqualifying. But he has personal qualities related to this
position which, for me, pose even greater concern.
I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together. It's
no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because he
himself is a predator. He has always been charismatic--able
to attract others through the strength of his personality,
willingness to take risks and break the rules. I watched his
younger brothers and cousins follow him down the path of drug
addiction. His basement, his garage, and his dorm room were
the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he
enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the
blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of
despair and violence.
Of course, people can grow and change. Through his own
strength--and the many second chances he was given by people
who felt sorry for the boy who had lost his father--Bobby was
able to pull himself out of illness and disease. I admire the
discipline that took and the continuing commitment it
requires.
But siblings and cousins who Bobby encouraged down the path
of substance abuse suffered addiction, illness, and death
while Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie, and cheat his
way through life. Today, while he may encourage a younger
generation to attend AA meetings, Bobby is addicted to
attention and power. Bobby preys on the desperation of
parents of sick children--vaccinating his own children while
building a following by hypocritically discouraging other
parents from vaccinating theirs. Even before he fills this
job, his constant denigration of our health care system and
the conspiratorial half-truths he has told about vaccines,
including in connection with Samoa's deadly 2019 measles
outbreak, have cost lives.
And now we know that Bobby's crusade against vaccination
has benefited him in other ways, too. His ethics report makes
clear that he will keep his financial stake in a lawsuit
against an HPV vaccine. In other words, he is willing to
enrich himself by denying access to a vaccine that can
prevent almost all forms of cervical cancer and which has
been safely administered to millions of boys and girls.
During my time in Australia working on the QUAD Cancer
Moonshot, I learned that cervical cancer is among the top
three forms of cancer among women in a majority of countries.
Tragically every year, more than 200,000 children lose their
mothers, orphaned due to lack of vaccines and screening.
Those are the real-world consequences of Bobby's
irresponsible beliefs.
We are a close family and none of this is easy to say. It
also wasn't easy to remain silent last year when Bobby
expropriated my father's image and distorted President
Kennedy's legacy to advance his own failed presidential
campaign--and then groveled to Donald Trump for a job. Bobby
continues to grandstand off my father's assassination, and
that of his own father. It is incomprehensible that someone
who is willing to exploit their own painful family tragedies
for publicity would be in charge of American life-and-death
situations.
Unlike Bobby, I try not to speak for my father--but I am
certain that he and my uncle Bobby, who gave their lives in
public service, and my uncle Teddy, who devoted his Senate
career to improving health care, would be disgusted.
The American health care system, for all its flaws, is the
envy of the world. Its doctors and nurses, researchers,
scientists, and caregivers are the most dedicated people I
know. Every day, they give their lives to heal and save
others. They deserve a knowledgeable leader who is committed
to evidence and excellence. They deserve a Secretary
committed to advancing cutting-edge medicine to save lives,
not rejecting the advances we have already made. They deserve
a stable, moral, and ethical person at the helm of this
crucial agency. They deserve better than Bobby Kennedy--and
so do the rest of us. I urge the Senate to reject his
nomination.
Sincerely,
Caroline Kennedy.
That is a hard letter for her to have written, a hard letter for me
to have read. But a person who has known him all his life, who admires
his capacity ultimately to kick the heroin addiction that he had, has
expressed very clearly questions about his character.
Now, why is that important?
You need a steady hand to run a major Agency with the awesome
responsibility of the healthcare and well-being of the people of this
country. That is a hard thing to do. It is very stressful. And that
history that was recounted by Caroline Kennedy certainly raises major
questions about the suitability of Mr. Kennedy to assume the
responsibility of Health and Human Services Secretary.
The second question is competence. Competence has to do with what
your experience is, what your training is, what your managerial
capacities are.
What Mr. Kennedy said is that he wants to be a disrupter in the
healthcare system. I am in favor of a disrupter. We need change. I
don't want a destroyer. And Robert Kennedy does not have the
temperament or the capacity or the competence to be merely a disrupter
and a builder, but to be a destroyer.
Competence--you know the obvious things: He is not a doctor. He is
not a scientist. He is not a public health expert or someone who has
led a complex organization like HHS or a private major organization
that requires extraordinary managerial skills.
He has built a career--we have a debate about this, but I come down
clearly on the side that his career is built on misinformation. And it
is misinformation in healthcare.
And, by the way, one of the things that is so tough: If you are a
mother, if you are a father, and you have a partner or you have a son
or a daughter who is really seriously sick, you will do anything--you
will mortgage your house, you will liquidate your retirement account,
you will do anything and everything you can--for the well-being of that
child or that loved one. You will do it. But also, if you have a person
you love who is diagnosed with a fatal illness, you also are really
vulnerable to folks who tell you there is an easy way out, a magic
therapy, a special doctor in South America. You
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are so hungry to get the cure, to get the answer to protect the person
you love. Anybody in the medical profession should take great care not
to abuse the trust they have.
My view: Robert Kennedy has spent his considerable talent promoting
misinformation to vulnerable people who have motives we all have, and
that is the well-being of people we love.
Some of the things that Mr. Kennedy said when he was attacking
vaccines, they are not based at all on science, but they appeal to
people's distrust of the standard medical profession.
Kennedy made anti-Semitic remarks about COVID-19, saying that the
pandemic was ethnically targeted to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese
people. I mean, what is that about?
His anti-vax work in Samoa contributed to a measles outbreak in 2019,
and 83 people--mostly children--died.
Kennedy falsely claimed 5G internet causes radiation sickness and DNA
damage. You know, some people believe this. They saw it on the
internet. He is promoting it using the magic of the Kennedy name, the
credibility that comes from being a member of one of the most storied
political families in the history of our country.
Kennedy doesn't understand what HIV/AIDS is and has espoused
homophobic and racist views on HIV/AIDS. He has said it is ``undeniable
that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS.''
Kennedy has also pushed a false theory that AIDS is really chronic
fatigue syndrome.
And Kennedy said it is antidepressants, not guns, that lead to more
mass shootings and has said Big Pharma's influence over the NIH stopped
him from researching mass shootings.
When I think about how did he come to be the nominee, it is relevant
because it obviously isn't on the basis of his scientific knowledge,
his skill at running a major organization, the healthcare research that
he has done. It was political.
He ran for President in the Democratic primary. He lost badly, made
no progress, selected his Vice Presidential candidate on the basis of
her capacity to write checks and keep the campaign going. It blew up
nevertheless, and he went, hat in hand, to Candidate Trump, who was
leading by far on the Republican side--pretty much uncontested--and
begged for a job in exchange for Kennedy's political support. President
Trump--then-Candidate Trump--told Kennedy: You could be HHS Secretary.
And here he is. So that is hardly the resume to inspire confidence
that he will be good at the job. He was good at ingratiating himself to
President Trump, but that is not confidence for me that he will be good
at securing the health and well-being of this country.
Interestingly enough, one of the things that President Trump did in
his first term that I have great respect for is Operation Warp Speed.
We were in COVID. A lot of things President Trump did, I think, were
bad, but I am going to talk about something he did that was really
good. We needed a vaccine. We all remember back then. We knew COVID was
deadly. We were all terrified that somebody or a family member, a
friend, would contract the virus.
We didn't know how it was spreading. There was even a time when, if
you got your groceries, you were supposed to leave your bag outside. We
just didn't know, and we were trying to figure it out. But what we did
all know is that what would give us security and safety was a vaccine,
and we didn't have one.
Operation Warp Speed was a commitment by the Federal Government to
put up money in advance to help facilitate research and put up money in
advance to build production capacity for a yet-to-be-invented vaccine.
So what happened with Operation Warp Speed was the combination of
Federal money going into pharmaceutical companies that devoted their
scientific expertise and medical expertise to finding a vaccine, and
they found it.
Then, when they found it, we didn't start building the manufacturing
capacity; we had it in place. That was a risk because we didn't know we
would get the vaccine. We didn't know if it would work or it wouldn't.
But the Trump administration made a commitment to be ready the moment
that vaccine was found, and as a result of that, we were able to get
the vaccines out to millions of people way before, in the absence of
Operation Warp Speed, it would have been delivered. That is an
achievement.
Robert Kennedy, 6 months after the vaccine was out and hundreds of
millions of lives were being saved, said it was a disaster. He
condemned it. So how is it, even in the face of this almost miraculous
discovery, creation, and then delivery of this vaccine and hundreds of
thousands of lives saved and a restoration of some sense of security
even though we had a long way to go, that Mr. Kennedy condemned the
scientific breakthrough that led to the saving of lives of people in
the Presiding Officer's State and in mine?
So it just bewilders me that a person is so rash and so rejects not
only science but life experience in this country where Operation Warp
Speed helped us get that vaccine created and distributed. That is
pretty strange.
You know, other things that Mr. Kennedy has said about vaccines--and
this really is serious, you know, because we are having debates about
these things, and people don't have confidence. The more we undercut
their confidence in vaccines--will they get vaccinated for polio? Will
they get vaccinated for measles? Will they get vaccinated for COVID?
The more you undercut that with specious claims, the more resistance
there is for us having the confidence we need as a society to make a
decision about how to proceed.
But Robert Kennedy, some of the things he did--he falsely claims that
vaccines caused autism. He falsely claims that vaccines cause
autoimmune diseases, develop disorders and allergies. He claims
vaccines can cause rare childhood cancers. He claimed that the Spanish
flu came from vaccine research--no evidence in the world for that--and
called COVID shots ``a crime against humanity.'' He claimed the COVID
vaccine was a conspiracy against Black communities. He raised a lot of
money off anti-vaccine propaganda films.
He went to Samoa, as others have said, to amplify anti-vaccine voices
and contributed to a measles outbreak, and that measles outbreak killed
83 people.
As my colleague from Georgia mentioned, he compared COVID policies
with Nazi testing programs. He compared vaccination requirements to
Nazi experimentation. He claimed pesticides make people trans. He
claimed HIV does not cause AIDS. You know, a couple of things that--he
claimed fluoride causes diseases and claimed that 5G internet causes
radiation sickness and DNA damage.
That is not a person I think that we can trust to build up science,
build up the credibility of good science, and make decisions about
allocation of research. It is just a person--I don't know how to
describe it--it is just a conspiracy-minded person who comes up with
the conspiracy of the day to challenge anything that is out there to
advance his interests.
You know, the other priorities--and this is where, on how best to
improve our healthcare system, there is going to be debate, and there
always is within the Democratic caucus, oftentimes within the
Republican conference, and certainly across the aisle.
I was a strong supporter of ObamaCare, and my Republican colleagues
in the House at that time were united in their opposition. It passed
really with the vote of Senator McCain here in the Senate, and the
debate never ended.
When I was in the House after ObamaCare was passed and the
Republicans took the majority, it seemed like every vote was about
repealing the healthcare bill. But finally that is behind us. It has
been accepted, but it is not necessarily guaranteed. In fact, we have
to make a lot of improvement.
But the priorities that I am hearing from the Trump administration,
which would be carried out by the Health and Human Services Secretary,
are very disturbing to me and would be very, very harmful to Vermont.
There are dramatic cuts in the Medicaid budget. Medicaid helps low-
income kids. It really is also the lifeline for our seniors who need
nursing home care. Medicaid in Vermont--194,000 or 30 percent of
Vermonters could potentially be impacted by the administration's cuts
to Medicaid and health insurance, tax credits, and assistance.
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And that is all kinds of Vermonters. That is 20,000 seniors, it is
67,000 children, and it is 19,000 Vermonters who have disabilities.
By the way, we have real affordability challenges in Vermont. One of
our big affordability challenges--we have very high property taxes and
one of the highest income taxes in the country, but the property taxes
are brutal on local property owners and homeowners.
If those cuts occur, as is being proposed by the Trump administration
and would be advocated by Mr. Kennedy, that is a $113 million hole in
the Vermont State budget. What do they do? Does the State go to
local property tax payers to try to make up the difference? Not
possible. Not sustainable.
You know, three proposals would dramatically reduce Federal funding
for Medicaid--block grants, per capita caps, and reducing Medicaid
matching rates. All of that has immediate and detrimental impact on our
budget.
Currently, the Federal Government pays between 50 percent and 77
percent of Medicaid costs and more for certain high-value services. The
administration proposals to slash billions in Federal funding from
Medicaid, as I mentioned, would really strain our budgets.
The programs we have that would really be affected include Dr.
Dinosaur. It provides low-cost or free healthcare for Vermont's
children and teenagers under the age of 19, and it also provides
healthcare for pregnant women, which is so tremendous, women who are
pregnant getting healthcare and then after the baby is delivered, care
then. That is such a critical time in their life and in the child's
life. We are going to keep that, not diminish it.
Vermont Medicaid has a prescription cost assistance program that
helps uninsured and those enrolled in Medicare with help on their drug
costs and long-term care services for seniors. We want to keep these.
We want to improve it. If there are ways that we can make it more
affordable, we want to do that. But we certainly don't want to blow it
up.
Vermonters could lose access to substance use treatment or mental
health care. Our rural hospitals in Vermont are like rural hospitals in
Alabama; they are a lifeline for our communities. They play a very
important role in the well-being of communities--not just community
health but the local economy. They are under enormous pressure. Doctors
there are not being paid what they need to be paid. They do an
incredibly good job for folks, but they are really in jeopardy.
I am working with Senator Boozman and others to try to get the
reimbursement rates for our community hospitals up to where they can be
sustainable. The Kennedy plan would cut that and hurt us.
So the bottom line here for me on the question of any nominee is
character, competence, and priorities. And on all three of these, I
come up short with respect to Mr. Kennedy. Aside from the fact that we
could do better, it is hard in many ways to see how we could do worse.
So I would urge all of my colleagues to consider the consequences of
their vote--a vote that would put a person of questionable character, a
person of questionable competence, and a person of, I feel, bad
priorities at the head of our healthcare system. So I would urge my
colleagues to vote no.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
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