Warnock sounds off on RFK Jr.: “Manifestly unqualified and unprepared”
The Georgia senator explains why he thinks the controversial conspiracy theorist and other Trump nominees are so problematic.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received a major boost on Tuesday morning in his bid to become President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, a role that would empower the anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist with broad influence over the nation’s healthcare and public health policy.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) cast the deciding vote in the Senate Finance Committee to advance the nomination to the Senate floor in a strict party-line tally with all Republicans in favor and all Democrats opposed.
Among those 13 Senate Finance Democrats was Raphael Warnock of Georgia. In a brief interview outside the Senate chamber, he told me that he was concerned about Kennedy’s potential confirmation because the nominee is, as he put it, “manifestly unqualified and unprepared.”
“Public health is the last place we ought to be playing politics,” Warnock said. “And this is political patronage in the worst sense.
Warnock added that Americans don’t think about many healthcare threats because the US has the best public health system in the world. (For what it's worth, the US excels in medical innovation, advanced treatments and research but lags behind many other developed countries in key public health indicators.)
“Are there things that need to be improved, even reformed? Yes, I’m an advocate of healthcare reform,” Warnock told me. “But this idea that you’re going to put someone in charge who, in the words of the president, is going to ‘go wild’ on public health. What does that mean?”
Cassidy, who also serves as the committee chair responsible for overseeing federal healthcare policies related to healthcare and practiced medicine for 30 years, expressed concerns about Kennedy’s past anti-vaccine statements.
During Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, he was extensively questioned about those statements—including one that suggested Black people have stronger immune systems than white people and therefore shouldn’t be given the same vaccine schedule and was central to why Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) said she wouldn’t support his nomination in a supplemental hearing the day after his Finance committee hearing.
Kennedy acknowledged the concerns and emphasized his commitment to basing health policies on scientific evidence.
But Warnock was not impressed with Kennedy’s performance.
“He has not changed his mind on these conspiracy theories. He said to my colleague just last week that he didn't think Black people needed the same vaccine schedule as white people,” the senator said. “There’s no scientific basis for that and it is deeply rooted in old-school racist theories about the Black body.”
Warnock told me the reason the anti-vax movement exists is because vaccines work.
“That’s the tragic irony. Vaccines are the result of the hard work of scientists and people who follow the scientific method in a disciplined way,” he said. “Vaccines are literally protecting us every single day from a whole host of viruses and pathogens and things that are inimical to our health. And the reason why you have the privilege of some playing around with this is because fewer and fewer people are alive who remember polio, for example, Mitch McConnell does. It’ll be interesting to see how he votes.” (More on McConnell, who survived a polio attack as a kid, below. The two polio vaccines are among the safest in the world.)
Kennedy also outlined his vision of promoting healthy foods, preventive care, and addressing public health challenges. However, he didn’t address concerns from Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who requested Kennedy recuse himself from vaccine-related matters if confirmed due to their concerns about potential conflicts of interest, given Kennedy’s past involvement in vaccine-related litigation.
But Cassidy said his decision to support the nomination came after receiving commitments from Kennedy and the administration on shared priorities, such as promoting healthy foods and a “pro-American agenda.”
RFK Jr. isn’t the only Trump nominee whose confirmation prospects went up today.
Tulsi Gabbard, the former Hawaii Democratic congresswoman and Trump’s pick to be Director of National Intelligence, was advanced out of the Senate Intelligence Committee to the full Senate on a party-line vote after Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), one of the last undecided Republicans on the committee, announced he would back Gabbard’s nomination.
Young previously expressed reservations about Gabbard’s perceived skepticism toward US intelligence agencies and her past defense of whistleblower Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified information.
Gabbard declined to label Snowden a traitor but emphasized her commitment to preventing unauthorized disclosures and protecting national security. She also defended her past meetings with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and her sympathetic views on President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
If confirmed as DNI, Gabbard said she would uphold intelligence operations' integrity and apolitical nature. After multiple discussions with Gabbard and receiving what Young described as firm commitments regarding her approach to national security, he decided to support her.
Cassidy and Young’s backing of Kennedy and Gabbard’s confirmation increases the likelihood that the full Senate will approve the nominees, where Republicans hold a three-seat majority. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) haven’t publicly stated their positions and could potentially oppose his nomination, which would force Vice President JD Vance to break a 50–50 tie with unanimous Democratic opposition and full attendance. On the Gabbard front, McConnell, Murkowski and Sen. John Curtis (Utah) are the senators to watch for potential defections.
If Kennedy, Gabbard and Kash Patel, Trump's nominee for FBI Director, are ultimately confirmed, the Senate will have confirmed all of Trump’s cabinet-level nominees, notwithstanding former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who removed his name from consideration for attorney general (Pam Bondi is expected to be confirmed to the position later tonight).
For Warnock, this outcome, which seemed implausible a few weeks ago, comes down to arithmetic.
“The truth of the matter is if you have a no vote from every Democratic senator, they still get confirmed. So I would call upon my [Republican] colleagues to ask themselves what in the midst of this process is happening to our constitutional responsibility of advise and consent?” Warnock said. “It is being displaced by the concern of being primaried. And I think the framers were wise in having three co-equal branches of government, of giving the Senate the role of advise and consent, so that the president couldn’t just simply appoint whomever they choose without any regard to competence.”
But Warnock also acknowledged that in most instances, the president should be enabled to appoint their cabinet—elections have consequences, as the maxim goes.
“So even though I’m opposed and adverse to almost everything Donald Trump represents, I came to this process with an open mind. I knew going in that none of the people he would present would be people I would present or that a Democratic president would present,” he said. “But this what we’re seeing right now, is unprecedented. This has got to be the worst coterie of nominees presented by any president of any party at any time.”