Watching Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hearing before the Senate Finance Committee was like watching a split screen.
On one side, Democratic committee members didn’t just berate Kennedy on his vaccine record, although plenty of time was spent on that. They also brought up a number of rather progressive statements Kennedy had made in what appeared to be an attempt to discourage Republicans from voting for him.
“It’s really great that my Republican colleagues are so open to voting for a pro-choice HHS secretary,” Sen. Maggie Hassan said as she displayed an image of Kennedy alongside a quote reading, “I’m pro-choice … I don’t think the government has any business telling people what they can or cannot do with their body.”
After the hearing, Sen. Bernie Sanders said people would “judge for themselves” after hearing about Kennedy’s past pro-abortion statements.
“That’s kind of an issue that people don’t usually flip around,” said Sanders, who had also spent some of his question time during the hearing getting Kennedy to say he believed climate change is a serious threat.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the committee, agreed, saying, “I had the first hearings on mifepristone in 1990, so I’m glad they did it.”
On the other side, Kennedy and the Republicans on the committee seemed intent on ignoring the vast majority of Kennedy’s life work — other than, ironically, his early career as an environmentalist lawyer who took large corporations to task over pollution.
“Thank you for your decades-long advocacy for a clean environment, for children’s health,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, who has implied that climate change could be a good thing if it takes the chill out of the cold winters in his home state of Wisconsin.
A number of Republican senators had only positive things to say after the hearing.
“I thought he did a great job,” Johnson told reporters. Sen. Thom Tillis said he hadn’t decided whether he’d vote for Kennedy, but was “leaning yes.”
To counter Democrats’ attempts to paint him as a die-hard progressive, Kennedy appeared to take a tactic right out of the book of his future boss: Deny, deny, deny.
“I never said that,” he responded to multiple lines of inquiry about past statements, at one point prompting Sen. Raphael Warnock to read comments Kennedy made in 2013 comparing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Nazi death camps. (Kennedy responded that he was not comparing the CDC to death camps, but comparing the injury rate of childhood vaccines to “past atrocities.”) He repeatedly asserted that he would carry out Donald Trump’s policies without regard to his past views on the issues.
“I am not anti-vaccine,” he said during his opening remarks, prompting an audience member to stand up and shout, “He lies!” before being escorted out.
Warnock said after the hearing that he found Kennedy’s testimony “deeply concerning.”
“The problem that he has is his opinions are well known and on the record,” he said.
Republican committee members seemed prepared to assist Kennedy in his goal of pretending the last 25 years of his career never happened. Committee Chair Mike Crapo, after introducing Kennedy as the son of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, asked the nominee questions about his goals related to diet and how he would like to “integrate nutrition-based interventions into our health care programs like Medicaid and Medicare.”
Those two programs seemed to stump Kennedy at times. He tripped up on a few questions related to Medicaid, saying at one point, “Most people who are on Medicaid are not happy” because “the premiums are too high. The deductibles are too high,” despite the vast majority of people on Medicaid not paying premiums. He also referred to Medicaid, a state-federal program, as “fully paid for by the federal government.”
“I and others that I respect in health care got the impression that he got the various programs confused,” Wyden said after the hearing.
Other Republican committee members’ questions also avoided the vaccine issue and stuck to relatively safe topics like mental health care, addiction prevention and improving the food supply.
But even when asked about those topics, Kennedy gave the senators plenty to chew on.
When asked about mental health care and psychiatric drugs by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Kennedy said he believes “we’re not just medicating our children. We’re overmedicating our entire population.” He has previously been supportive of so-called “wellness farms” as an alternative to antidepressants.
On addiction, Kennedy made a point of bringing up his own past struggles with heroin, saying that he sees strengthening the primary care system’s ability to respond to substance abuse issues as a “priority.”
When asked by Sen. Roger Marshall how he would fight chronic disease, Kennedy pointed to the quality of the American food supply, blaming it not just for chronic disease but for increasing the risk of dying from infectious disease. He also pitched improving the food supply as good not just for consumers but also for food producers.
“Europeans won’t take our food,” Kennedy said. “That’s not good for farmers.”
Marshall agreed, telling Kennedy, “You are the person to lead HHS to ‘Make America Healthy Again.’ God has a divine purpose for you, and I look forward to working with you.”
Members of the audience, many of whom wore apparel with phrases like “Confirm RFK Jr.,” applauded Marshall’s words. But when the questioning swung back to the Democrats, they had a very different response.
“I wanna give you a fair shot,” Sen. Mark Warner said to Kennedy while asking him about whether he’d pledge not to fire federal employees who work on food safety.
“No, you don’t,” Dr. Calley Means, a longtime friend of Kennedy’s, murmured from his seat behind the nominee.
“I will commit to not firing anyone who’s doing their job,” Kennedy told Warner. “Based upon my opinion.”
It appears at least one Republican senator on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is planning a similar tactic for Thursday’s hearing with Kennedy. Sen. Tommy Tuberville told reporters that he wasn’t planning to ask Kennedy about abortion or vaccines.
“I’m gonna ask him about chronic diseases, things like that. Nutrition,” he said.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, thought to be one of the trickiest Republican votes for Kennedy, told reporters she hadn’t watched Wednesday’s hearing.
“I get to do it tomorrow,” she said.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.