-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. SMITH. Mr. President, I want to just, first, comment on how much I appreciated the comments of my colleague from Maine, Senator King-- both in your elucidation of the deep challenges of the Robert Kennedy, Jr., nomination but also your close look at what the difference is between the legislative branch and the executive branch, and the role that we have in this body to provide advice and consent.

And I appreciated what you were saying about kind of what your North Star is when you look at these nominations.

I would say I agree with you that I do believe that incoming Presidents should be able to surround themselves with people whom they trust, and that, of course, we may strongly disagree with the President; however, he has the right to have people around him who agree with him.

But I think that there is something that you said, Senator King, that was extremely important. I also look at these nominations in terms of whether I believe they have the base-level qualifications to do the job. And then the second thing I ask myself is, Can I trust these individuals? Can I trust Robert Kennedy to follow the law?

I mean, that is fundamentally what their responsibility is--to, certainly, be loyal to the person who put them in that role, but also, at a base level, that they are going to follow the law.

So, Mr. President, I rise today to highlight what I consider to be the threat of Robert F. Kennedy, the threat that he poses to Americans' health and safety and well-being.

In fact, I have concluded--I have talked with him. I have listened to him. I have asked him questions, both in a private setting and also in committee. And I have read his words and his history. I can only conclude that he cannot be trusted with this important job; that I cannot trust him to follow the laws of this land.

I believe that Mr. Kennedy is wholly unqualified for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services, and that he is unprepared to lead. And I think that he cannot be trusted with the health and the well-being of Americans, particularly in this moment.

Now, if you are listening to this, and you don't really know that much about the Department of Health and Human Services, you have got a busy life, you are trying to figure out how to afford your life and how to kind of hold it together in what is a very busy and complicated world, I want to just be clear about what I think Mr. Kennedy's confirmation would mean for Minnesota families. If he is allowed to become Secretary, I have concluded that your family will be less safe, that your loved ones will be more likely to get sick, and that you and the people you care about will be less likely to get the care you need.

As I have thought about this, what I find most disqualifying about Mr. Kennedy is how he has basically made his career--he has built a career around saying what he needs to say in order to get attention, and by getting attention, he is making money. I think it is just important to understand this. This is whether he is talking about vaccines or infectious diseases, whether he is talking about anything.

So you walk away from talking with this individual not entirely sure what it is that he believes because he does seem willing to say nearly anything to nearly everybody without actually considering what impact his words have on the lives of real people, whether he is talking about reproductive freedom, whether he is talking about mental health care, whether he is talking about infectious diseases, whether he is talking about vaccines.

So let's focus a bit on the question of vaccines because I think this is the thing that has gotten the most attention--and rightly so.

In decades of public appearances, as well as in our one-on-one meeting--the one-on-one meetings that I had with him--as well as when he talked about this in front of the Finance Committee, Mr. Kennedy has continued to promote harmful and dangerous information--information that if people followed and they paid attention to him and they did what he suggested, it could do real harm to their families; it could hurt them.

If you think about vaccines, this is his long and very public record of denying the safety and the efficacy of vaccines. In fact, he has spent almost the last two decades of his life promoting these harmful and false theories that vaccines will cause autism and that they are otherwise unsafe.

As an example, in 2021, he proudly described stopping strangers out on hikes and telling them not to vaccinate their babies. Can you imagine that? You are out walking around, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., comes up to you--a man of stature and power--and says: Don't vaccinate your children.

Those words have impact.

During a podcast interview in July of 2023, Mr. Kennedy said--and I believe Senator King quoted this as well:

There's no vaccine that is safe and effective.

So, OK, just think about that. He is saying: Don't pay any attention to the science. Don't pay any attention to the experts. I am going to tell you that there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.

Those words have consequences.

The online store is another example. Mr. Kennedy's organization, the Children's Health Defense--there is an online store. You can all go on and check it out. You will find there that they are still selling little baby onesies and T-shirts for little children that have messages on them like ``Unvaccinated, Unafraid.''

Now, of course, here we are on the verge of a vote to decide whether the U.S. Senate is going to confirm Mr. Kennedy, and, of course, now he is denying all of that. He is distancing himself from all of these past statements. But you can't run away from your words, certainly in this day and age--and, I would argue, in any day and age. Those words are out there. You said them. They are on the record. They are on video. And it matters what the Secretary of Health and Human Services says, what he says about these things, and, of course, it matters what he doesn't say as well. Words have real consequences.

Just the mere fact of his presence being as the head of this Agency, just the fact that he sits there is going to be a factor that will cause some people not to know whether they can trust vaccines. He is in a position of power and authority. He has a high and loud bully pulpit--an individual who has told Americans, both when he was out on hikes, stopping them as they are walking by, and on every media megaphone that he could find, that vaccines are neither safe nor effective. Yet here he is about to assume, unless my colleagues come to their senses, this most highest, you could argue, public health job that affects the health of all of our families. This is an unbelievable and an unacceptable risk to the health and safety of Americans.

I also wanted to highlight for my colleagues an exchange that I had with Mr. Kennedy when he came before the Finance Committee, where I serve. I wanted to ask him about a statement that he had made about Americans and antidepressants. When I probed him on this, I confronted him with some things he had said in the past about antidepressants. Basically, he attributed a connection between people who are using antidepressants and school shootings. I asked him about that, and I asked him whether he thought that folks who take antidepressants are dangerous or not. He refused to even say that Americans who take antidepressants are not dangerous. He could not even get those words out of his mouth. In fact, he doubled down on his claims that antidepressants do cause school shootings, and he claimed that this is an area that needs to be studied and that he knows people who have had ``a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than they have getting off heroin.''

Now, this is a typical strategy that I saw Mr. Kennedy take with many of our colleagues both on the HELP Committee and on the Finance Committee. When confronted with the facts and asked whether he believed the science and the facts, he would always say some version of ``Show me the data; show me the information'' even when the research is settled, the data is settled.

Here, let me come to this question about whether or not antidepressants are dangerous and are somehow a contributor to school shootings, which is an outrageous thing to say.

There is a study in 2019 that was published in the Journal of Behavioral Science and Law, and it says it appears that ``most school shooters weren't treated with psychotropic medication before their attacks. Even when they were, no direct or causal association was found.''

I was stunned when Mr. Kennedy again sort of said ``Well, I don't believe that research'' or ``I need to see other data; we need to look at this.'' Of course, he is not willing to accept the facts and the science. He is not willing to do that.

I am simply not willing to trust Mr. Kennedy when it comes to ensuring that your children, your loved ones, the folks that you care about in your lives, are going to actually have access to the mental health treatments they need to live their lives as productively as they possibly can.

It also, I think, is worth noting that these comments that Mr. Kennedy is making linking antidepressants to school shootings--what it does, of course, is it perpetuates the stigma that so many Americans who struggle with mental illness, mental health--so many of those Americans struggle with the stigma, and they already feel that, and yet here is potentially the next head of Health and Human Services who is perpetuating this stigma in a very real way.

I have seen this in my own life. I have seen people who have been bowed down by this feeling that they can't talk about their challenges with their mental health because people are going to think less of them. It is a stigma that I have spent my time in the Senate working in a bipartisan way to try to break down. So to see it perpetuated in this way by Mr. Kennedy is just such a clear reason why he cannot be trusted.

The rigorous, peer-reviewed research on SSRIs--a common form of antidepressant--is the science Mr. Kennedy has willingly chosen to ignore, but it is not the only science he has willfully chosen to ignore. Mr. Kennedy said during his confirmation hearings that if President Trump directed him to go after mifepristone--one of the key drugs that is used in medication abortion--he would do whatever the President ordered, even though this is a medication that has been proven safe and effective for more than two decades. Yet Mr. Kennedy said that he would follow the guidance of the President and not the law when it comes to the safety of mifepristone.

In fact, as my colleague Senator Hassan made so abundantly clear in the committee, over 40 safety studies have demonstrated what Mr. Kennedy was not willing to see, which is that there is clear evidence that this medication is safe.

On reproductive freedom, Mr. Kennedy has proven himself wholly untrustworthy, repeatedly flip-flopping on his position depending on whom he is talking to. Now, this is something that many of us have seen in our lives--a person who will say one thing to one person and another thing to another person, all with the goal, it seems, of winning friends and influencing people, but this is not the kind of character you want to see in this most important job at the Federal Government, leading the Department of Health and Human Services.

Here is just a bit of an example of how this has played out with Mr. Kennedy on the issue of reproductive freedom and abortion rights. On the morning of August 13, 2023, Mr. Kennedy said:

I believe a decision to abort a child should be up to the woman during the first three months of life.

Now, people may agree or disagree with this view, but it is clear what he is saying here.

The very same day, his campaign followed up by saying that his position on abortion is that it is always the woman's right to choose and that he does not support legislation banning abortion.

So on the same day, two different positions.

Then, on May 19, 2024, a few months later, in a podcast interview, he said:

I wouldn't leave it up to the States--

This is a quote.

I wouldn't leave it up to the States. I believe that we should leave it up to the woman--

We shouldn't have government involved. --even if it's full-term.

OK. So there is a completely different view.

Then the very next day, he tweeted:

Abortion should be legal up to a certain number of weeks, and restricted thereafter.

Mr. Kennedy seems to change his mind so often that we don't know what he actually thinks, what he actually stands for. But when you are the Secretary of Health and Human Services, you have to stand up for something. You have to stand up for the laws of the land.

What is clear through all of this back-and-forth--it is clear to me-- is that the Trump administration and Mr. Kennedy are more than willing to restrict or even ban access to medication abortion despite the fact that they have been determined to be safe and effective and that Mr. Kennedy and President Trump are, in fact, dangerous to a woman's access to medication abortion.

I want people just to think about this for a minute. If you live in a State like mine, in Minnesota, where the State has determined that abortion should be accessible, that this is a decision that is up for people to be able to make on their own without government interference--and roughly 60 percent, maybe a bit more now, of abortions are done through medication abortion. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Donald Trump are going to affect your rights in Minnesota if they take away the right to mifepristone just as much as they affect the rights of somebody who is living in Texas or any of our States.

Mr. President, I want to change the topic to discuss a bit the question of infectious diseases and how Mr. Kennedy has taken similarly unfounded positions--positions that are not based on the science at all.

On infectious diseases, he has taken a position that I think could put Minnesota families at risk. Here is an example of that. At a Children's Health Defense conference in November of 2023--this is the anti-vax organization that Mr. Kennedy led for the last 7 years--Mr. Kennedy said that he is ``gonna say to the NIH scientists, God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We're going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.''

Now, Mr. Kennedy and President Trump may want to give infectious diseases a break for the next 8 years, but I am pretty sure that infectious diseases are not going to give the United States of America a break for the next 8 years.

Here is a classic example of that. Across the country, we are facing a very real public health threat from avian flu. In Minnesota, farmers and producers know this better than anywhere, although it is certainly not affecting only Minnesota; it is affecting many of our States. This is an infectious disease that is infecting flocks of wild birds and also domesticated poultry. Nearly 150 million chickens across the United States have had to be culled, had to be euthanized, to prevent the spread of the virus. In the last year, bird flu has jumped from poultry to livestock, often to dairy cows, and then from livestock to humans--often, the individuals that are working in livestock operations. So this is something we have to take seriously.

This is important for us to pay attention to. We need surveillance. We need to be working on treatments. We need to be evaluating whether we need to be finding a pathway potentially to some sort of a vaccine.

Avian flu is not going to take an 8-year break. It is already infecting chickens and livestock, and it is already infecting Americans.

And I know that in Minnesota, people want somebody leading the Department of Health and Human Services who is paying attention to this and wants to be on top of this.

You know, one of the things that is sort of incredible, when you dive into the things that Mr. Kennedy has written, is that it is not even really clear if Mr. Kennedy believes that germs cause disease.

I mean, if you read his words on this, you come away with a very concerning perspective. For six pages in one of his recent books, just as an example, he extols the virtue of something called the miasma theory while simultaneously casting doubt on the basic and well- accepted scientific evidence that germs cause disease.

You know, Mr. Kennedy doesn't even really describe this miasma theory correctly, but he most certainly doesn't accurately represent germ theory, which is the basic understandable concept that medical students are introduced to at the very beginning of their medical education that germs, viruses, bacteria are the cause of many, many human illnesses.

You know, and this is the kind of stuff that if it were coming from the Secretary of Health and Human Services, people are going to listen to this. And I just, like, think about the chilling effects that this could have on the healthcare that people are able to seek and receive, particularly if Mr. Kennedy is going to be dialing back or stopping the research on infectious diseases that is the lifeblood of the United States public health work that we do.

At the Finance Committee and then the next day at the HELP Committee, my colleagues and I gave Mr. Kennedy opportunity after opportunity to dispel the false and misleading claim he has spread for decades and to distance himself from these past positions. And we gave him the chance to tell Americans that he would keep them and their children safe and that he wouldn't threaten their access to treatments or to cures or to care and that he believed the research that is out there and accessible to anybody and everybody who wants to see it--the research that is taught at medical schools, the research that is followed by National Institutes of Health, and he couldn't do it. He couldn't just say that vaccines don't cause autism. He couldn't just tell us that antidepressants don't cause school shootings.

He couldn't just tell us that he will make sure that America's health insurance is protected. I mean, he could barely--in his conversations and the questions that he was asked, he could barely articulate that he understood the difference between Medicare and Medicaid. Instead, what happened is that Mr. Kennedy repeatedly talked about following the good science, the science that is good. But the science that he relies on is not good.

And in so many circumstances, he quotes science or studies that have been disproven. The studies that he has referenced have been withdrawn, or they don't say what he claims or purports to say that they do.

Most of all, what happens is that this has the potential to hold our researchers and our scientific community back from making the real progress that we need to make when it comes to medicine and disease and treating ailments.

Think about the progress that we could one day make to help cure cancer, to prevent Alzheimer's. If we have to revisit the history, the record of science, because Mr. Kennedy says that he doesn't think it shows what everybody else thinks it shows, think about how that is going to set us back, how that is going to keep us from moving forward to address the real health challenges of today and tomorrow.

Think about what it might have meant if Mr. Kennedy had led the Department of Health and Human Services when we were in the midst of Operation Warp Speed and we were doing everything that we possibly could to get a vaccine out to Americans and the world to stop the millions of deaths that were happening because of the COVID-19 virus.

What would have happened if Mr. Kennedy, sitting in that position of authority, had said: I don't believe the science; I think we need to do more. I don't think any vaccine is safe and effective; and, therefore, I want to call this vaccine back.

And, in fact, that is what Mr. Kennedy did. He submitted a call to the Department of Health and Human Services in the early days of the vaccine saying that he thought that it should be pulled back from the market.

Think about what impact that could have had on all of our families if he had been in a position of authority and had been able to accomplish that. Over and over again, when he is faced with the actual science-- for example, on the science that proves that SSRIs are not associated with school shootings, that vaccines do not cause autism, that germs do cause illnesses--he has refused to accept it, and he has doubled down on his dangerous beliefs.

So this is concerning when it is an individual who is speaking on a podcast, but it could be a matter of life or death when it is the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. As I think about what I said at the beginning of my remarks about my strong belief that my job as Senator is to assess whether I can trust somebody in this role, can I trust them to follow the law? Can I trust this individual to protect the health and well-being of the people in my State and the people around the country? The answer is clearly, no, this is an individual who cannot be trusted.

At the heart of this nomination, of course--the heart of the work of the Department of Health and Human Services--is America's health and healthcare. And it is clear to me that Mr. Kennedy has made it clear that he will enable the Trump and Musk agenda of chaos, that he will enable what they are doing not to execute the laws of this country, which is their constitutional responsibility, but to attempt to make the laws of this country.

And, you know, we can see this during his confirmation hearings. Repeatedly during his confirmation hearings, Mr. Kennedy said that he would follow Mr. Trump's directives.

Now, I am going to be clear about this, I understand that it is the job of any Cabinet official to follow the policies of the individual who has put them there, but not if those policies break the laws of the United States of America.

Department heads, Cabinet heads, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services is required to execute the law, not to execute the will of the President--because the President is a President; he is not a king.

What I am convinced of at this stage is as we see what, I believe, is a massive power grab by Donald Trump and Elon Musk to not just execute the laws but to make the laws, that Mr. Kennedy would be a part of that process, that he would be an enabler of that power grab that we see happening all over the country. And that is another reason why I cannot trust him.

I want to take a look for a minute at the directives that President Trump has put out already. Let's take a look at these--these directives of stopping lawfully executed payments to healthcare organizations that have been made following the will of Congress, the people who are supposed to be making the laws in this country.

I heard a lot about this from Minnesota, huge amounts of concern reflected back to me in my office about what is actually happening with the President's directives, basically directing to withhold funding that Congress has authorized.

I heard from Minnesota's community health centers that they were going to begin doing layoffs because of this Federal funding freeze-- basically, a massive cut that they are experiencing. You know, community health centers are all over the country, and in my home State of Minnesota, they are the place that individuals can go to get basic, preventative healthcare. It is a very important part of our healthcare network, and yet many of these have come to me and said that they are basically going to be laying off providers and other folks who are providing direct care to patients.

One community health center's CEO in greater Minnesota, outside of the metro area, said that it was the worst day in his 38-year career when he got word of this freeze.

Now, I understand that this freeze has been unfrozen for now, at least in some cases--though, in other cases it seems like it is back on again. In fact, I hear repeatedly that it is off and on and off and on in this sort of chaotic and confusing dance that they have started.

But these clinics are still facing real challenges about getting access to their Federal funding, and this is threatening their operations. Imagine if you were running a--like a small bootstrap and, you know, small little health center and every day you are just trying to make payroll. You don't have millions of dollars sitting in your bank account waiting for a rainy day. Every day is a rainy day, and every day you are just trying to make it work. And very suddenly, one of your most important ways of paying to provide healthcare to an individual has just evaporated overnight.

So then what happens--because people still get sick, people still need healthcare, even if they are unable to get it at a community health center. So what do they do?

Think about this, right now, in Minnesota--it is probably the same in West Virginia and other parts of the country--Minnesota emergency rooms are packed full of people who have the flu or RSV or norovirus. They go to the emergency rooms. You want to go to the emergency room when you really, really need emergency care. You go to a community health center when you need to be able to get access to urgent care but the care that you need right now. And what is happening is that because there are a lot of illnesses, people are getting sick in the wintertime, it is like 20 below in Minnesota right now, if they can't get their primary care in a doctor's office, in a clinic, they are going to end up in the ER.

And then what happens to all the rest of us who really might need emergency care? The ER is jammed to overflowing. There is no space. You have to wait 5 hours to get the care that you need. That is what is happening with this funding that is being put in jeopardy. That means that community health centers might not be able to help the patients that they typically help. And I am not talking about a small number of people here. That is 170,000 people in Minnesota who rely on community health centers.

And what is going to happen, those folks are going to end up in emergency rooms, and that is going to increase wait times, and it is going to stress the capacity of hospitals to provide care that people need.

President Trump did this. Robert F. Kennedy, if he were head of Health and Human Services, I have no reason to trust that he would stop this. In fact, I believe the opposite, I believe he would enable it. And this is why I think his nomination will end up making all of us less healthy and less safe and less secure.

President Trump, in another example, unlawfully cut National Institutes of Health grant funding earlier this week. This amounts to millions of dollars that support lifesaving research into Alzheimer's and cancer and Parkinson's disease, and I am just talking about in Minnesota there.

This was retroactive; it happened overnight. Hospitals are left struggling. Big research hospitals like the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic are suddenly looking at massive cuts to their research.

They have trials for important, you know, treatments and cures for serious diseases that are suddenly thrown into chaos, and you have individuals who are part of those trials who are hopeful that they are going to be getting--they are hopeful that, in some way, that this is going to help them to find a cure for what disease is ailing them.

And with this cut to NIH funding, overnight massive cuts, what does that mean for people's health and safety and security? It means people are less well-off. National Institutes of Health is under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services, the organization that Mr. Kennedy is asking Congress to provide advice and consent on.

Again, I have no confidence. In fact, I am sure that Mr. Kennedy would be an enabler to President Trump's power grab here and his undermining, along with Elon Musk, his undermining of this extremely important research that helps us be healthy, helps us find the treatments and the cures for the diseases that are a threat to all of us.

So I see my colleague from Massachusetts is here. I know she has an important perspective on this, with Massachusetts being another--as is Minnesota--another center of research and education and medical education, and I suspect that we agree with one another when it comes to the threat that Robert F. Kennedy poses to all of our health and well-being.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source