The view from inside RFK Jr's confirmation fight
The controversial pick to lead HHS makes it to the finish line.
A sentence that would’ve been impossible to predict a year ago: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is poised to become America’s top health official today.
Unless a couple senators change their votes, the longtime liberal will join Donald Trump’s cabinet, six months after throwing his support to Trump in exchange for a promise to do, well, this.
In today’s paper, I traced how Kennedy went from longshot to the precipice of confirmation as secretary of Health and Human Services.
It’s a story that felt evocative of the modern GOP: a member of the most famous Democratic family, who until recently supported abortion-rights and has spent years questioning vaccines, is now set to lead the nearly $2 trillion federal health department after Republican senators acquiesced to Trump.
Kennedy also tapped into a powerful movement of Americans unhappy with the status quo in health care — and who were convinced that Kennedy was the person to shake it up. He survived a barrage of lobbying from Democrats, public health leaders and even some conservatives who insisted he was unfit for the job.
There were at least three major turning points — when Trump decided that he wasn’t going to lose any more Cabinet nominees after Matt Gaetz’s nomination collapsed; when the anti-abortion groups decided to sit out the fight over Kennedy; and when Sen. Bill Cassidy made his decision to vote for Kennedy after days of agonizing about it.
You can read more here:
How RFK Jr., once a long shot, arrived at the precipice of Trump’s Cabinet
My colleagues at The Washington Post and I closely covered the fight over Kennedy — from last year’s partnership with Trump through a pair of contentious Senate confirmation hearings last month. We profiled the decision facing Cassidy, the Republican physician who ended up as the pivotal vote on whether Kennedy’s nomination would advance to the Senate floor.
I wrote about how Kennedy faced off with Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a series of showdowns that went viral online, and symbolized one man’s attempt to seize the other’s mantle as a populist health-care reformer.
I’ve written about a bunch of Senate confirmation battles, but this one was unlike any that I can remember. Kennedy had such devoted followers — his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda clearly struck a chord — and such passionate opponents.
And both sides did their best to sway lawmakers.
On the day of the first confirmation hearing last month, doctors in white coats walked past people in green MAHA hats in the packed halls of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.1 Outside the Capitol, Democrats rallied by invoking the story of Samoa’s measles outbreak and arguing that Kennedy should be held responsible. (Kennedy has denied any responsibility.)
Samoa was invoked a few times in the hearings, too, which clearly annoyed some of Kennedy’s supporters. There was an audible groan in the first confirmation hearing, and I’m pretty sure a Kennedy supporter started humming loudly, perhaps as an effort to drown out a Democratic senator, when Samoa came up again in the second confirmation hearing.
The pressure on the mild-mannered Cassidy was also something to behold. The Louisiana senator said that his office was getting thousands of messages per day, and that he was personally getting hundreds — and I believe it, given the number of people who told me they were lobbying Cassidy to vote one way or another.
When Cassidy finally announced his decision to vote for Kennedy last week — sitting in a hearing room that he’d entered more than 12 minutes late — you could feel an audible shift in the room, as cameras whirred and people got up to leave, knowing that Kennedy’s confirmation had likely been cinched.
Now the hard part is over for Kennedy — and the harder part may begin. Previous HHS secretaries have faced the coronavirus pandemic, the family-separation crisis and all manner of other frustrations. I’ll be watching — from my new perch as a White House reporter — to see if Kennedy can truly Make America Healthy Again, or if his HHS goes another direction.
Here’s a very inside-DC footnote: Kennedy’s first confirmation hearing was moved from the Senate Finance Committee’s usual room, Dirksen 215, to a much larger room on the ground floor that’s often used for high-profile hearings. (Dirksen 215 was still available as an overflow room, with a simulcast.) There was still so much demand that I’m not sure if everyone got a seat.