Can Someone Please Explain to Me Why RFK Jr. Matters?
Also: Russian legal theory comes to America.
Schedule: Only two Triads this week. Hope your Thanksgiving preparations are going well.
1. Ideas
Sensible people are worried about what will happen if RFK Jr. is confirmed as secretary of health and human services.
They are worried because RFK has ideas about vaccines, and fluoride, and food, and medical research. They are worried that, if given control of the immense discretionary power of the HHS bureaucracy, Kennedy will make decisions which will lead to sickness, disease, and death on a level not seen since . . . well, since the last time Donald Trump was president.
And so there is a movement to block Kennedy’s appointment.
I would like someone to explain to me—like I’m a young child, or a golden retriever: Why would the appointment of someone else to head HHS make any difference?
Cabinet secretaries exist to enact the vision and priorities of the president.
Ergo, Kennedy must have been given this appointment because he shares the president-elect’s views on vaccines, research, etc. in toto.
Ergo, if Kennedy’s nomination is defeated and someone else takes his place, then he or she would pursue the exact same policy revisions on vaccines, research, et al.
Correct?
Because the only possible reading of this nomination is that Trump has the exact same views as Kennedy regarding health and science. Which is why he nominated him. And if Kennedy cannot be confirmed, Trump will find someone else who promises the exact same policy decisions, just in a less brain-wormy package.
But of course, that’s not the only possible reading of the Kennedy nomination.
The other reading is that Kennedy has been nominated as an act of pure transactionalism:
Trump needed Kennedy’s support, so he promised him HHS.
Trump does not give a fig about anything HHS does.
If Kennedy were to ban all vaccines, Trump would be fine with that.
If Kennedy’s nomination is blocked and Trump then appoints a normal person like, say, Mike Leavitt, then Leavitt would not pursue any of Kennedy’s policies.
And Trump would be fine with that, too.
Because Trump has fully severed policy from ideology and reduced it to nothing but transactionalism.
So we are forced to conclude either that:
(1) Trump is dead-set against killing vaccines and so it doesn’t matter who the secretary of HHS is. Or,
(2) Trump could care less about vaccines and has fully outsourced decisions surrounding health, medicine, and scientific research to his HHS secretary. Meaning that those judgments will be driven entirely by the private obsessions of whoever lands the job.
I’m not sure which is worse.
Riddle me this: Today there are a fair number of conservatives and Republicans defending the Kennedy nomination.
If Kennedy is defeated and his replacement does not take any of the dangerous actions that he has promised—actions with much of Conservative Inc. today insists are totally reasonable and not at all dangerous—will those people then shout in protest? Will they demand that whoever gets the job do all of the crazy shirt that Kennedy has promised to do? Removing vaccine authorizations and halting disease research?
Or will they say nothing and be privately relieved that they don’t have to spend the next year defending a man they know to be unmoored from reality?
Obviously, we know the answer to this. In Republican politics and conservative media, it’s transactionalism all the way down.
2. Militias
Wired has a story about militias operating along the border who believe that they’re about to enter some sort of public-private partnership with the federal government for immigrant hunting: