On Thursday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before the House Ways and Means Committee about President Donald Trump’s budget, which includes numerous cuts to public health infrastructure.
More than a year into his stewardship of the sprawling bureaucracy that is HHS, he has massively remade it into his image of conspiracy-mongering and the spread of disinformation. He ousted the Senate-confirmed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez, over their disagreement on vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration, which falls under his jurisdiction, removed a page warning about fake “cures” for autism that could wind up being dangerous. The CDC under his watch also significantly scaled back the vaccine schedule, which a federal judge halted.
Not surprisingly, Republicans did not seem bothered by any of this, seeking to focus only on the “Make America Healthy Again” initiatives from the secretary such as promoting eating healthy food and fitness.
But throughout the remarks of many of the senior Democratic Ways and Means members, they rehashed fond memories of when Kennedy’s uncle, the late John F. Kennedy, was president.
“I was in that audience the day before the presidential election in 1960 as Sen. Jack Kennedy finished his campaign in Waterbury, Connecticut, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and that night in Boston, Massachusetts,” said Rep. Richard Neal, the top Democrat on the committee who is 77.
The seeming moment of nostalgia quickly turned to a sharp rebuke of RFK.
“We need people not to be preyed upon by demagoguery, and there should not be a politicization of these very issues,” he said.
The same could be said for Rep. John Larson, another 77-year-old Irish Catholic politician from New England.
“There wasn’t a house door I didn’t knock on where there wasn’t a picture of Pope John the XXIII and John F Kennedy,” the Connecticut Democrat said in beginning his remarks. Only then did he express his dismay at the secretary over his attacks on vaccinations and public health.
“I think you can appreciate how deeply concerned people are about this and how the contrast between what your uncle and the President of the United States said in his beliefs and yours with respect to vaccinations,” he said.
The whole thing had a feeling of sort of an intervention of their wayward Irish Catholic cousin, even though Kennedy long strayed from his family’s heritage as he promoted misinformation about vaccines and autism before he delved deeper into conspiracy theories and endorsed Donald Trump in 2024.
Democrats probably hoped they could invoke the late Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, who famously told Dan Quayle during their 1988 vice presidential debate, where the neophyte Quayle compared himself to the future President Kennedy, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
It’s incredibly telling that Democrats sought to invoke the spirit of Bentsen, who was part of a losing presidential ticket. Compared to Republicans — who cap the amount of time a member can lead a committee to four consecutive years, thus cycling through new talent — Democrats rely on a seniority system.
That “respect for elders” line of succession means that their leaders are rehashing stories from when many Americans were not alive — such as when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., ran for president and was himself killed on the campaign trail in 1963.
It took the younger Democrats to push back against Kennedy’s disinformation with specificity.
Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), who is 61, rightly pointed out the harm in Kennedy’s claims that, “Every Black kid is now, just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence” and that “those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented.”
Kennedy defiantly denied making such remarks, even though he said just that in 2024 when he was running for president.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who is 55, specifically pointed to a seemingly absurd story that Kennedy once cut off a dead raccoon’s penis to research it and contrasted it with the drastic cuts to the National Institutes of Health.
But even then, Grijalva only has her seat because her father, Raúl, refused to give up his congressional seat despite the fact he missed most votes in the previous congress as he underwent cancer treatment. Gallingly, the elder Grijalva still called for Joe Biden to step aside despite his own being incapacitated.
And while Neal briefly mentioned Kennedy and Trump’s unscientific claims that the use of Tylenol during pregnancy could cause autism in children, it took 45-year-old Rep. Blake Moore, a Republican from Utah with an autistic son, who mentioned specifically how much his comments hurt his wife.
“We don’t even know she took Tylenol during her pregnancy, but that was a hurtful moment for her,” he said. Of course, Moore being a Republican had to couch his criticism in praise by saying “I just want to encourage the administration and your team to keep at it.”
But this further underscores a larger problem. Democrats can’t help but hold onto the past, both in their rhetoric and their leadership. This makes them sound out of touch and ill-equipped to recognize the current threats a charlatan like Kennedy poses.
All of this comes less than two years after Democrats completely melted down after they chose to run the octogenarian Biden despite Americans from both sides believing he was simply too old to do the job.
Some Democrats are choosing to step away. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who at 86 is old enough to have met President Kennedy as a young woman, is stepping aside after a career as the most accomplished congressional leader this century. Former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, also 86, is too.
But too many, such as Neal, Larson and former whip James Clyburn, 85, cling onto power. And that makes it virtually impossible for Democrats to recognize the impending threats to the institutions they claim to value.
The whole point of the Kennedy political experiment in the 1960s was to have younger talent that were children and grandchildren of immigrants who could break through the WASP establishment. Now, those inspired by Kennedy are the very geriatrics JFK campaigned against, and it shows.
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