RFK Jr. Says the Senate Can’t Hold His Health Agenda Hostage Anymore

For almost two years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says, he was running the country’s health department with a phone that kept ringing. Every time he reached for something big, a Republican senator was on the other end with a warning.

Now he says that phone has gone quiet, and he plans to use the silence.

“Every time I tried to do something robust, I would get calls saying, ‘If you do that, we’re not going to confirm your appointees,’” the health secretary told a roomful of supporters at a MAHA Action event in Washington on Monday night. He didn’t name the senators.

He laid out why he thinks those calls are over. Democrats flipped the Senate on Nov. 3, and Kennedy said he had told his team at HHS what that meant. “No matter how great the appointee is, not one vote will go to them,” he said, according to a transcript of the clip. “Not one of my appointees ever got a single Democratic vote. The Senate no longer has any leverage over me. And that’s a big deal.”

The calls came from his own side

The striking part of Kennedy’s speech is where he pointed. He didn’t blame Democrats for slowing down Make America Healthy Again. He blamed the senators who were supposed to be his allies.

“You get throttled in this position by a lot of different people,” he said, naming people inside the agency, inside the White House and in Congress. “Most of them do not want change. And so what we were doing was very disruptive.” It wasn’t one person or one industry, he added. “It was coming from everywhere. But one of the places it was coming from was the Senate.”

The way he told it, the confirmation process was the leash. Want your pick for a top health job approved? Then don’t push too hard on food dyes, pesticides or whatever else the lobbyists were calling about that week. With Democrats ready to vote no on his nominees no matter what, a Republican threat to withhold votes doesn’t carry much weight anymore.

One of his most public Republican critics won’t be there to make those calls, either. Senate health committee Chairman Bill Cassidy of Louisiana lost his primary this year to Julia Letlow, who is headed to the Senate in January, the Epoch Times noted.

A friend in the chief of staff’s office

The other half of Kennedy’s optimism has a name. President Trump announced on Nov. 6 that Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff and “one of my most trusted advisors,” would take over as chief of staff on Nov. 9, with Susie Wiles moving on after what Trump called “an outstanding job.”

Kennedy wasted no time. About two hours after the announcement, he posted this, and it’s now been seen more than 2 million times:

Karoline Leavitt backed him up the next morning. “Stephen Miller is 100% committed to the MAHA Movement,” she wrote. “I am so excited to see all that the White House and @SecKennedy accomplish in the next two years to make our country healthier.”

On Monday, Kennedy filled in the backstory. He said Miller met with him before the midterms and promised to put MAHA near the top of his list once the election was over. He said he had dinner at Miller’s house on Nov. 1, where Miller’s wife, Katie, told the guests they had no idea how passionate her husband is about the issue.

“We have Steve Miller in, who’s a friend of our movement,” Kennedy said. “And I don’t think anything is going to get in our way now.” As for the Kraken, he said, “That’s what we’re about to do.”

Miller has called Kennedy “a crown jewel” of the administration, the Washington Sun reported, and Katie Miller has hosted him on her podcast.

He isn’t showing his cards

What exactly is coming? Kennedy wouldn’t say. “There’s a lot of press here, and I don’t want to unveil our strategies,” he told the crowd. He did say some wins had already landed with White House help, including Wiles’s, like the new food pyramid and getting mercury out of dental fillings on Indian reservations. Other goals, he said, never made it over the line. “There were things that we didn’t get done, and that was very frustrating to me. And they are very, very important things.”

The White House is standing behind him. Asked whether Trump plans to keep Kennedy next year, spokeswoman Allison Schuster told the Sun he “has done an exceptional job working to Make America Healthy Again,” pointing to the new dietary guidelines, tougher oversight of food additives and money for regenerative farming. HHS put it more bluntly: “Threats of impeachment will not distract him from delivering for the American people.”

That impeachment talk is real. Several incoming Democratic senators want him gone. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland wrote that he “must resign or be fired.” Senator-elect Annie Andrews of South Carolina has said she wants to impeach him, and Democrats are expected to open investigations into HHS when they take the gavel in January.

The odd new math on food

Here’s the twist that could make Kennedy’s bet look smarter than it sounds. Some of his food fights may actually get easier with Democrats running Congress.

Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine, one of the few Democrats who openly likes parts of MAHA, has a bipartisan bill she calls “People Over Poison” that would take away legal shields from pesticide makers. Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, in line to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has bills to tighten oversight of food additives. And Sen. Bernie Sanders, set to chair the Senate health committee, has pushed for warning labels on the front of food packages, also a Kennedy priority, the Sun reported.

Pingree admitted Democrats are “crazy mad” about his vaccine moves. Still, she said, if he survives it all, “I’m going to work with him.”

So the man Democrats want impeached may find more votes for his food agenda in the new Congress than he got from the old one. Kennedy spent two years being told to slow down by his friends. Starting in January, he’ll be dealing with people who openly oppose him, and he says that’s exactly why he’s finally free to move.