Nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

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 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 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. 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.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source