Jan. 29, 2025 - The Michael Knowles Show
05:43
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| RFK Jr.'s confirmation hearings for HHS Secretary are over. | |
| Here's my immediate reaction. | |
| I'm feeling good. | |
| I'm feeling good. | |
| I thought Kennedy, with one exception, which we'll get into on the show tomorrow, I thought he performed very, very well. | |
| Very hostile questioning from Democrats. | |
| Ron Wyden is the ranking chairman for the Democrats on the committee, or ranking member, rather. | |
| And I think he sounded more like Ron Wyden. | |
| Am I right? | |
| Am I right, huh? | |
| But he didn't really land a blow on him. | |
| The best part about the hearing, as far as I'm concerned, came from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. | |
| Sheldon Whitehouse is a Democrat senator, but he's an old buddy of RFK Jr., so it puts him in a really tough position, because Kennedy's confirmation is supposed to be party line. | |
| This is going to be the white shirts versus the red shirts. | |
| That's going to be the vote. | |
| Except that... | |
| Bobby Kennedy is a Democrat, and he's from the Kennedy family, which is one of the most prominent Democrat families in the country, and he's got long-standing Democrat ties, one of them apparently to Sheldon Whitehouse. | |
| To me, the signal that Sheldon Whitehouse will vote for Kennedy, if it comes down to it, if enough Republicans defect, came in his refusal to ask Kennedy a question. | |
| So if you were just listening to the tone or even just listening to White House's words, you would say, oh man, this guy's really going after Kennedy. | |
| Man, he's got a lot of complaints about Kennedy. | |
| But notice what he didn't do. | |
| He didn't ask him any questions. | |
| All the other Democrat senators were trying to catch Bobby Kennedy in a scrub. | |
| White House opened his questioning. | |
| He said, and listen, I've got a lot of concerns. | |
| You're just going to have to listen to me, which was a great gift to Kennedy because there's no gotcha moment there. | |
| So to me, that was White House. | |
| Tipping his hand saying, look, I'll let this go through. | |
| If you lose Collins, if you lose Murkowski, if you lose McConnell, if it really comes down to it, I'll vote for him. | |
| The most ridiculous part of the hearing was this woman, what's her name, Tina something? | |
| Some senatrix that no one had ever heard of. | |
| And she went after Bobby Kennedy because Kennedy was criticizing SSRIs. | |
| On some podcast or in some paper or sometime years ago, he pointed out that he's got members of his family who are on SSRIs. | |
| There's mental illness in the Kennedy family. | |
| And he said there's some real questions about it. | |
| I mean, now it's, what is it, one in five American women who are on SSRIs? | |
| And they've got all of these negative side effects. | |
| And it's just, I don't know, there are a lot of questions about it. | |
| So this woman goes out there. | |
| She says, In this unhinged rant, screeching, screaming, not seeming like the most stable person, she said, and I've been on SSRIs, and essentially I'm the proof that SSRIs work. | |
| I think that undercut her argument. | |
| Okay, just judging by her line of questioning, I would probably ban SSRIs from ever being used anywhere in the country. | |
| Otherwise, you had softball questions from the Republicans. | |
| We were waiting to see if any Republicans were going to tip their hand that maybe they weren't going to vote for Kennedy. | |
| It all went perfectly fine. | |
| They were starting to get into the weeds. | |
| Even the way Elizabeth Warren is pretty tough in these hearings, even the way Elizabeth Warren was talking, she seemed to be questioning him as if he were going to get the job to try to get him on record to say, you know, will you go work for the pharmaceutical industry after you leave HHS? | |
| To which Kennedy replied, no, they hate me. | |
| There's no, no, don't worry about that lady. | |
| And she was trying to nail him on some other things. | |
| But it was. | |
| It was as if it were already a fait accompli that Kennedy were going to get the job. | |
| So I felt fairly confident going into the hearing that Kennedy would be approved, especially after Pete Hegseth sailed through. | |
| Hegseth was really the canary in the coal mine for the controversial nominees. | |
| Now we're getting to Tulsi, Kash Patel, and Bobby Kennedy. | |
| I think Kennedy is going to make it through, barring some unforeseen Last-minute surprise. | |
| And I don't know what kind of last-minute surprise is there with Kennedy. | |
| We've heard about the affairs. | |
| We've heard about his heroin addiction. | |
| We've heard about all the kind of crazy stories over the years that hasn't tanked his nomination. | |
| So then the last question for the Republicans is, will Kennedy be good for us? | |
| Do we conservatives want Kennedy to be the HHS secretary? | |
| And the big holdup was over abortion. | |
| Kennedy is a Kennedy. | |
| He is a Democrat. | |
| He has been pro-abortion for his whole public life. | |
| The Democrats really tried to nail him on this in order to drive a wedge between Kennedy and the Republicans and pry away some GOP votes. | |
| Not the squishy votes, but actually the conservative votes. | |
| And Kennedy said, I think every abortion's a tragedy. | |
| I agree with President Trump that every abortion's a tragedy. | |
| And this contradicts previous statements he said. | |
| But what we know about Kennedy is that Kennedy is, at least ostensibly, a Catholic. | |
| And Kennedy is... | |
| He comes from a big Democrat family. | |
| And those two things are in opposition, especially on the issue of abortion, which the Catholic Church teaches is not just one issue among many, but is a non-negotiable fundamental right from which all the other rights emanate and on which the other rights depend. | |
| I know for a fact, Kennedy used to go to the church that my grandmother went to for 60 years. | |
| So I know that he actually does take it somewhat seriously, and it seems that between his two conflicting religions of liberalism and Catholicism, on this issue now, especially with the political pressure from the Republicans, he seems to be leaning more... | |
| I feel confident, especially with this administration, the most pro-life administration ever, that Kennedy will protect life at HHS, especially knowing some of the other people who are in the department. | |
| So overall, I think a big win for Kennedy, big win for the Republicans, Democrats' hardest hit. | |
| We will go into the specific moments and what this means and the one big mistake Bobby Kennedy made during the hearings. | |
| Tomorrow on the Michael Knoll Show, 8.30 a.m. |
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