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Last week, Health and Human Services secretary and anti-vax crank Robert F. Kennedy extended his efforts to destroy US public health infrastructure by forcing out CDC Director Susan Monarez.
The chaos at the CDC is not exactly unexpected or novel at this point. President Donald Trump has led a thoroughgoing assault on just about every branch of the federal government. He’s also made it clear that he has sweeping contempt for science and public health — his administration has even defunded cancer research.
Nonetheless, the ousting of Monarez is a little different, inasmuch as the crusade against the CDC is pretty clearly Kennedy’s baby. Kennedy’s vision of an America without vaccines — and of American infants once again ravaged by measles, polio, whooping cough, and Covid — is Kennedy’s vision. It’s not the GOP’s, and not even really Trump’s.
The fact that Kennedy, personally, is driving the ouster at the CDC creates somewhat different dynamics than in some other crises. There has been more serious bipartisan pushback, for starters. It’s possible Kennedy will have real trouble confirming some sycophantic anti-vax ghoul as the head of the agency.
Flickers of GOP spinefulness are welcome as far as they go. What’s really notable, though, is the extent to which Republican senators and leaders have remained largely supine even in the face of a radical assault on their grandchildren by a transparent death-dealing fraud who wasn’t even a member of the party a year ago.
RFK Jr seeks a CDC director who will kill children
The disaster at the CDC began when Monarez would not agree to cosign Kennedy’s unscientific, horrifically dangerous attack on childhood vaccines. Or, as her lawyers put it, she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts."
Kennedy was enraged and said she was dismissed, leading to resignations by the head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and the head of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease.
This immediate fight, though, is part of a longer struggle between Kennedy and the Republican Senate caucus.
In 2023, Congress under Joe Biden made the CDC head a position that required Senate confirmation. Trump initially nominated former Florida Rep. David Weldon, an anti-vax crank who was closely aligned with Kennedy.
But Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who serves on the Health Committee, effectively blocked the nomination, and Weldon withdrew without having a hearing. In his place, Trump nominated Monarez, a former director of a federal biomedical research agency and a Republican who had served as acting CDC director earlier in the year.
At her confirmation hearing, Monarez declared her commitment to vaccines, reassuring Republicans like Murkowski. She also carefully avoided criticizing Kennedy, reassuring Trump loyalists. She was confirmed in late July on a party-line vote, 51-47.
Again, senators specifically voted for Monarez because she supported vaccines. And Kennedy tried to fire her specifically because she would not agree to back his efforts to restrict and falsely delegitimize those same proven and effective vaccines.
It’s notable also that Kennedy does not have the authority to dismiss Monarez. She, like he, is a Senate-confirmed official, which means that only the president can dismiss her. The Trump administration did eventually get around to officially firing her, claiming she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” But the confused process in which Kennedy took illegal action without fully coordinating with the administration is a pretty clear indication that it is Kennedy, not Trump, who is driving the MAHA agenda.
Quid pro quo
Usually, presidents do not allow random cranks to unilaterally guide major policy areas with little oversight, because they typically have strong policy preferences themselves. More, they generally don’t want to have political crises thrust upon them by an anti-vax weirdo whose evil lies already led to a terrifying measles outbreak.
But in this as in many things, Trump is unique. He knows little about policy and, except for his passionate hatred of windmills, he cares even less. He knows and cares so little about policy, in fact, that he seems largely unable to understand that putting unqualified people in positions of power can lead to policy disasters.
The one thing Trump does care about, though, is loyalty, which he tends to equate with displays of submission.
RFK Jr initially planned to run for president in the Democratic primary, attempting to use the Kennedy name to fool voters into casting ballots for him. When polls showed that wasn’t going to work, he decided to run as an independent. Then, when polls showed that wasn’t going to work, he made a deal with Trump, and endorsed him in exchange for a major position in the administration.
There’s not much evidence that RFK’s endorsement swung the election — it’s difficult to find a reputable analyst making the case that his voters breaking for Trump was decisive. Still, Trump obviously appreciated Kennedy’s support and his willingness to abandon principle and demonstrate public fealty.
Trump has also demonstrated his own distrust of public health and of vaccines. Operation Warp Speed, the effort to develop a covid vaccine, was probably the single policy success of Trump’s miserable first presidency. Trump’s instincts, though were always to downplay and deny covid existed or was really a threat. When the vaccine distribution became associated with Biden, he quickly disavowed it, noting in one Fox News interview that “as a Republican, it’s not a great thing” to talk about vaccines “for some reason.”
Trump isn’t a committed ideologue on this issue — he gets covid vaccines and boosters, presumably because he doesn’t want to die. Even in the midst of the current crisis, he’s made it clear that he doesn’t really share Kennedy’s enthusiasms and doesn’t even really understand them.
On Monday, Trump took to social media to argue that drug companies need to do a better public relations job promoting their covid drugs and vaccines, but in the process he seemed to place some blame on Kennedy for the “ripped apart” CDC.
It’s hard to say whether Trump is distancing himself from Kennedy deliberately or whether he’s expressing frustration with the fact that different people are telling him different things when all he really wants to do is play golf. Either way, it’s clear he’s ambivalent about, or indifferent to, Kennedy’s crusade.
Trump isn’t indifferent to his own quest for power, though. He sees Kennedy as an ally, and he sees his anti-vax monomania as a plausible vote getter because it’s popular with the MAGA base. But his support for Kennedy is rooted in contingent opportunism, not in deeply held belief, and certainly not in some sort of broad-based, longterm right-wing ideology.
Senate to the rescue — or not
A president is not supposed to elevate a wildly unqualified, dangerous crackpot as a quid pro quo. If the president does so, the Senate is entrusted with stopping him.
Republicans, however, have mostly given Trump carte blanche. But there’s no reason to give a fake Republican like Kennedy that treatment. Republican senators could just say, “Hey, he’s not actually on our team. Let’s find someone else who is, okay?”
For a half a minute there, it looked like they might do that. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a doctor who has spoken passionately about the life-saving value of childhood vaccines, holds a key position on the Senate Finance Committee. He debated voting down Kennedy’s nomination. But then Cassidy was pressured by a bunch of MAGA chuds, and Kennedy promised him that he would not spend his time in office undermining vaccines.
That was a transparent lie, but Cassidy used it as an excuse to remove his own spine. So did Murkowski. So did the Senate’s foremost brow-furrower Susan Collins. The only Republican who voted against Kennedy was former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell is one of the most evil legislators in the history of the Republic. He is also, though, a partisan hack, and, as a partisan hack, he apparently was able to figure out that Kennedy, among his many other failures, is not even a Republican.
Murkowski, Cassidy, and other Republicans seem to have hoped that installing a non-crank CDC head would put a brake on Kennedy. Now that it has not, they are scrambling. Collins is once again “concerned and alarmed” and Murkowski says the firing “raises considerable questions about what is happening within the agency.”
Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Health Committee, is calling for an upcoming meeting of the Department of Health and Human Services Committee that advises on vaccines to be postponed. If the committee does meet, Cassidy says, “any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy.” Kennedy fired all the members of the committee and replaced them with his own lying, deaths-head anti-vax cronies.
Republicans currently have a three seat majority in the Senate, meaning that four of them are needed to block any Trump legislation or appointment. If Collins, Murkowski, Cassidy, and McConnell believe that Kennedy is a threat to the health and safety of this country (and he obviously is!) they have the power to thwart him. They could grind the Senate to a halt. They could demand an immediate CDC leader be named and sent to the Senate for confirmation and that person be someone with credibility, not RFK’s dittohead deputy and now acting director Jim O’Neill. For that matter, they could block all further Trump appointments until Kennedy resigns.
It's possible that Cassidy, Murkowski, and maybe even a handful of other Republican senators care enough about dead children, or at least care enough about the electoral effects of a massive measles outbreak, to do more than furrow brows and issue statements. They did reject one unacceptable anti-vax CDC director, after all.
The fact is, though, that if you hold your breath waiting for moral and effective resistance from the GOP, you are likely to end up dead.
When Trump rushes to gut voting rights or lower taxes for the wealthy, Republicans of course support him — gutting voting rights and lowering taxes for the wealthy have been party priorities for decades. Here, though, the GOP is signing on to mass murder of children based on the novel theories of a man who has no party ties except a single Trump endorsement. It is a measure of the party’s utter hollowness, brokenness, and evil that even in this case, it can barely find the resources to demur.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate this edition, please do your part to keep Public Notice free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading.
Yep, it will be interesting to see if the Republicans make a stand. But I agree with Noah, very good odds would be available for anyone prepared to put money on 4 or more Republicans doing the right thing - even against an isolated target like Kennedy.
"or at least care enough about the electoral effects of a massive measles outbreak, to do more than furrow brows and issue statements."
This part is the important part, and is the only thing the GOP considers. As of July 9th, the measles outbreak had reached 1,288 cases in 38 states. It's the biggest measles outbreak since 1992. Nobody in the Trump administration or the GOP cared about this national disgrace until now because they didn't have a recognizable Democrat they could readily blame for it.
Given that there's a Trump-related scandal/mess/disaster at least once a week, Kennedy's further sullying of his family's name will probably be forgotten by most Americans and the media pretty quickly. Over the weekend, and again this morning there's been some reporting Trump's health potentially being an issue, and I believe the Epstein survivor press conference is tomorrow.
Also, despite the outbreak officially spreading to 38 states, Texas accounts for 762 cases by itself, with Kansas accounting for another 56. Of course, this *is* a national problem because there's already been at least one case in 38 states, and illnessess like measles, COVID, etc. can spread quickly. However, if this does somehow become a political issue, the first person who they'll blame (with assistance from Faux Noise) is Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly. Not because it's logical or because Gov. Kelly has done anything wrong, but because she's a Democrat...and their cultists will eat it up.
I'm quite sure Trump would actually prefer Collins and Cassidy lose. They voted to convict him after his 2nd impeachment. Losing Collins and/or Cassidy's seat really wouldn't make things that much more complicated for Trump. Like McConnell, Majority Leader John Thune's a lot of things but he's not a stupid politician. Unlike the lightweights in the House GOP, he'll keep his caucus in line unless it's in his interest not to do so.