[Pages S944-S947]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  NOMINATION OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.

  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

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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

[[Page S946]]

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.

[[Page S947]]

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.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.

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