Moose.
That’s the self-named bully who arrived at our schoolyard in the late 1950s. Worse than the bully himself were his handlers, his posse. Merely to ask the question “Who’s Moose?” was to have yourself hauled before him to be bullied and humiliated.
His henchmen cheered Moose’s provocations and derided all who dared challenge or ignore him.
I found his gang to be especially loathsome, toadies all.
Today, such henchmen circle the U.S. Capitol. The MAGA types warn any senator who dares to insist on their right to challenge Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. To them, the Senate’s “Advice and Consent” role, enshrined in Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, must yield whenever Trump demands it.
The Senate must now decide whether to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
With three Republican senators on record opposing Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary—Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Murkowski—it now appears that Senator Bill Cassidy would be sufficient to topple the nomination. McConnell, a polio survivor who spent time in his youth at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Warm Springs to ease his ailments, seems to have no truck for the Kennedy scion’s conspiracy theories.
A successful gastroenterologist by training and one of only seven Republican senators to vote guilty at Trump’s second Senate trial, Cassidy said he is “struggling” with the Kennedy selection to run HHS. He questioned Kennedy repeatedly last Thursday on his long history of opposing vaccines and reportedly spent much of this past weekend on the phone with the environmental attorney turned MAGA champion
“Can I trust that is now in the past?” Cassidy asked about vaccine opposition
Kennedy’s answer is to question why the medical community hasn’t been able to explain the steady rise in autism itself.
Cassidy’s vote to reject or accept the Kennedy nomination will likely prove decisive. There are 53 Republicans in the Senate. With all Democrats expected to oppose RFK, Jr., the GOP will be short of the 50 “aye” votes to confirm along with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President J.D. Vance.
MAGA groups backing Trump in the fight are treating the Louisiana senator as a GOP renegade. They promise to challenge him in the 2026 Republican primary, something he probably would have faced anyway for his impeachment vote.
Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the slain president, former ambassador to Japan and Australia, who generally avoids politics, has attacked her cousin, RFK, Jr. She said they grew up together and views him as a “predator,” accusing him of dragging other family members into illegal drug use. She says Bobby is especially unfit for the HHS secretary position. She says he is “addicted” to grabbing “attention and power” and said he sadistically put mice in blenders to feed to his falcons and other birds of prey
While Kennedy eschews most politics, backing Senator Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid helped doom Hillary Clinton’s.
Her endorsement won’t sway Republicans like Cassidy, but it puts in stark relief how controversial this nomination has become. It’s a battle between the bully, our nation’s Moose, Donald Trump, and his MAGA henchmen versus whoever stands up against this nomination.
Senator Cassidy should be applauded for his commitment to the values of good medicine and the constitutional role of the U.S. Senate in its “Advice and Consent.” He’s even given the nominee an exit ramp from his conspiratorial views. Cassidy has said if Kennedy would come out and said vaccines are safe, that they do not cause autism, it would “have an incredible impact.” Without it, the Louisiana senator has said, “I got to figure that out for my vote.”
I grew up reading Alan Drury’s 1959 bestselling novel Advise and Consent, which describes the controversy surrounding the Senate confirmation of a secretary of state nominee accused of having been a Communist Party member. I often watch the 1962 film, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, and a young Betty White as a U.S. Senator from Georgia. Advise and Consent is perhaps the best book on the Senate’s traditional role in such matters.
Drury’s novel taught me at a young age the extraordinary courage it takes for a single senator to break with his party and the brutal pressures used to keep him from doing so.
And I remember reading something Robert Kennedy Jr.’s father read on the subject. It came in a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Always do what you are afraid to do,”
It was a line Senator Kennedy marked himself in the Emerson book.
With the greatest of humility, I advise Senator Cassidy to follow the senior Kennedy who dared challenge President Lyndon Johnson and many in his party on its prosecution of the Vietnam War and to reject the Kennedy who had been pushing “anti-vax” conspiracy theories. He’s not inclined to take advice from someone who worked for Tip O’Neill and Jimmy Carter, but he does know the Hippocratic oath that physicians adhere to and its injunction to do no harm. Can anyone doubt that Kennedy risks great harm to the nation his father so loved?
