The Democrats Turned Kennedy’s HHS Hearings Into a Circus

What Are they so Afraid of? Big Pharma? Big Ag?

By Dick Russell, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

(Reprinted and abridged with permission from the author, on whose Substack this was originally published.)

A “disclaimer” to begin: I am not an impartial observer, but a close friend for many years of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a sometime writing colleague, and also his authorized biographer. See my earlier substack for my views on what he could bring to our beleaguered public health system.

In less than a week, we’ll likely know whether RFK Jr. is allowed by the U.S. Senate to become America’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Last week, he testified before two congressional committees, the first of which (Senate Finance) will vote on whether or not the full body should consider him. That decision is expected on Tuesday, February 4. [Note: the Senate Finance Committee could vote against Bobby but he could still be confirmed on the Senate floor, which is scheduled to vote next week.]

There was so much interest in Kennedy’s nomination that an overflow crowd began gathering at four in the morning outside the hearing room last Thursday. One man in a front-row seat, the author Walter Kirn (Up In The Air is among his eight books), afterward engaged for more than an hour with his journalistic colleague Matt Taibbi in recounting his observations on their weekly podcast.

“Imagine being sort of charged, as he was right out of the gate,” Kirn said, “with killing children, being a conspiracy theorist, a money grubbing, ambulance chasing lawyer, and all these other things. And the minute you open your mouth to try to make a defense, they tell you they don’t want to hear it….It’s really quite sadistic.”

I watched all four hours of that first hearing, and Kirn is right-on. I was appalled at the way Democratic politicians I long admired, particularly Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, raised their hackles and like many of their colleagues often refused to let RFK Jr. get a word in edgewise. I don’t say this just because I believe that, of all Trump’s appointees, Kennedy could make an important difference to our country’s frightening state of public health both young and old. Or just because I’m sick of hearing “legacy media” regurgitate the same falsehoods and half-truths about Kennedy that their political pals parrot. Yes, he’s made mistakes and sometimes jumped to conclusions without fully digesting all the facts. Where appropriate, he’s sought to clarify these. He’s thick-skinned, with “the patience of a saint” as one friend put it in containing himself amid the democrats’ onslaught, after which an outpouring of support for him followed on social media.

The eyebrow-raiser for me occurred the next morning, coming across a list of democratic senators who’ve taken millions from the pharmaceutical industry that Kennedy is seeking to hold more accountable. In 2023-24, Democrats received $26.4 million and Republicans $16.1 million from pharmaceutical and health product companies. The historical trend switched political parties in 2020, and in the latest election cycle, Kamala Harris got almost six times more funding support from Big Pharma compared to Donald Trump.

Based on data from the Federal Election Commission, the list of senatorial recipients during the 1990-2024 period finds Bernie Sanders at the top, ($1,953,613, right behind Mitch McConnell) followed by two other RFK Jr. attackers - Raphael Warnock ($1,763,425) and Elizabeth Warren ($1,224,145). This money doesn’t come from the companies themselves, but employees or PACs affiliated with the industry that contributed $200 or more. Still, it’s not chump change and begs the question - was Senator Warren’s demand that Kennedy not sue pharmaceutical companies the real possible conflict-of-interest?

Some of what transpired during that hearing reached levels of absurdity. Catherine Cortez Masto, perhaps appropriately from Las Vegas, shook the dice to ask if Kennedy would simply be “a rubber stamp for this administration….disregarding your beliefs and what you think….How do you live with that?” RFK Jr. replied calmly: “President Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again.” The Senator from Nevada responded flabbergastedly: “Is that the only reason why you’re at HHS?” Hmmm…..does she have a better reason?

As another close friend who watched the whole spectacle told me: “He earned his way all the way there, more qualified than most of the others. But they didn’t quote his books and their legitimate sources. They [the Democrats] just want to be on the other side of things. From listening to Warren and Sanders, it showed they didn’t really have anything to challenge. I’m concerned about this culture losing the power to reason.”

And who would the opposition like to see in his place? If they let a Fox News commentator with ancient Christian symbols tattooed all over him become our Secretary of Defense, how does Kennedy represent a greater threat than that? So, what is it that they despise so vehemently? I think it starts with what Walter Kirn summed up: “Democrats of that ilk, they always hate the people they think are apostates more than they hate the actual right-winger who is a familiar character to them.”

An apostate (same root as apostle) is classically defined as one who has disaffiliated, abandoned, or renounced a religion. And yes, that’s what RFK Jr. did in bidding farewell to the Democratic Party, to which his ancestors pledged their fealty and to which he was loyal all his life.The truth is, he was forced out of the Democratic Party because he was blackballed from participating in the 2024 primaries and because he also challenged the status quo in describing how far the Party has departed from its original values in the half-century-plus since his uncle and father were its leaders.

I sat down in the wee hours and, wishing depth psychologist James Hillman was still here to talk to, wrote out some thoughts on where the hatred may be coming from. It can’t be about policies, because you’d think these democrats would be on the same page certainly about our sick kids and providing them better food. Or maybe their own children and grandchildren aren’t among that 60 percent with chronic health problems, because they’re part of the “privileged class.” Even questioning whether vaccines might need better testing before being jabbed into people’s arms is anathema, breaking a taboo.

Once upon a time, less than 20 years ago, RFK Jr. was the darling of the liberal establishment, a Time Magazine “hero for the planet” fighting corrupt politicians like George W. Bush and his corporate cronies. Why couldn’t he leave children’s health well enough alone? The pill-makers and shot-givers had our backs, right? How could anyone even suggest there might be a correlation between the autism epidemic and the mercury-then-aluminum adjuvants tucked into the 72 vaccines our kids now had to take by the time they were five.

You may not love President Trump, but he did keep his promise to Kennedy and nominated him to run HHS. He appears to have followed through on his pledge to release all the government’s files on JFK’s assassination, a subject close to my heart and my work - and even added making public what’s been kept secret about the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. That still matters, if we’re ever to start coming to terms with the truth about where it all began to go south.

Perhaps it was just good politics, but I found Republican Chair Mike Crapo’s remarks at the close of the Finance Committee hearing to be a sincere and civil gesture. He said to Kennedy: “Thank you for appearing. You’ve been accessible to members and staff on both sides of the aisle in a rigorous process. I want the whole world to know that you spent hours in meetings answering questions outside of this hearing and providing documents and responses on issue after issue after issue. You’ve gone through the most thorough vetting process that any committee in this Congress puts anybody through. I think that you have come through well and deserve to be confirmed. I look forward to working with you.”

I can’t end this newsletter without commenting about the “legacy media” and their ongoing attacks on Kennedy. I guess that term is used to differentiate it from social media, where anything goes. Which I’m not fond of either, but the “legacy” that I see bequeathed by the New York Times, which for most of my adult life I read avidly, is now often a jaundiced journalism that’s in subtler ways as “yellow” as anything the Hearst papers headlined.

Today, the New York Times is the most consistent source of front-page hit pieces against the “Great Traitor,” RFK Jr. The closest print outlet we have to a national newspaper ran no fewer than three pieces demeaning Kennedy, including one op-ed, entitled “Our Health Is in the Hands of the Man Who’d Make Us Sick,” by Nicholas Kristof,that concluded: “I hope senators will protect American kids from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.”

This followed stories the three previous days with headlines featuring the “heated exchanges” at the confirmation hearings.

How about a more accurate headline like “RFK Jr. Points Out America Now Spends Four Trillion Dollars on Chronic Diseases”? The day of Kennedy’s second committee hearing, a study was released by the University of Minnesota, which shows that death rates among young adults between 25 and 44 remain much higher than expected post-pandemic. In 2023, the death rates were in fact some 70 percent higher than if they hadn’t started rising around 2010.

The study was published in JAMA Network Open, and its lead author, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, said of the findings: "The rise in opiate deaths has been devastating for Americans in early and middle adulthood. What we didn't expect is how many different causes of death have really grown for these early adults. It's drug and alcohol deaths, but it's also car collisions, it's circulatory and metabolic diseases - causes that are very different from each other. That tells us this isn't one simple problem to fix, but something broader."

Which is precisely what RFK Jr. has been talking about. He needs to be given a chance to make good on changing this equation.

Kennedy’s former vice-presidential running mate, Nicole Shanahan, didn’t mince words in a video post on X following the hearings: “This is a bipartisan message and it comes directly from me. While Bobby may be willing to play nice, I won’t. If you vote against him, I will personally find challengers to primary [against] you in your next election. And I will enlist hundreds of thousands to join me. Big Pharma and Big Ag have exploited us for far too long. you’re either on the side of transparency and accountability, or you are standing in the way. The choice is yours. Please choose wisely.”

Which begs the question: how can the Democratic senators choose wisely? They spent more time listening to themselves speak than asking meaningful policy questions. How is RFK Jr. going to make America healthy again? No one asked that. How are we going to measure improvement from our chronically ill children? Not that either.