Pete Hegseth Squeezes Through the Senate. Is RFK Jr. Next?
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The Senate votes narrowly with a vice presidential tiebreaker to approve Pete Hegseth as the U.S. Secretary of Defense, while confirmation hearings loom this week for President Trump's next pick who might face some GOP defections, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues, columnists Kim Strassel and Alicia Finley. It was a late Friday night in the Senate which split 50-50 on Hegseth's nomination to lead the Pentagon.

Until the arrival of Vice President J.D. Vance, who broke that tie only the second time in U.S. history that a tie has been broken by the vice president for a cabinet nominee. Three Republican senators voting no on Hegseth, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski and Maine's Susan Collins.

Seemed to be upset about Hegseth's past statements about women in combat, as well as allegations about his personal behavior. The third no being Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was focused more on Hegseth's experience and the size of the job of managing the Pentagon. Here's a piece of the statement by McConnell. Effective management of nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly a trillion dollars, and alliances and partnerships around the world is a daily test with staggering consequences and

He went on to say that Mr. Hegseth had not yet demonstrated that he will pass this test. Be that as it may, Hegseth was sworn in on Saturday, and here he is on the job Monday outside of the Pentagon. There's an emergency at the southern border that the protection of the sovereign territory of the United States is the job of the Defense Department, and the cartels are foreign terrorist organizations. As a result...

This Pentagon Snap 2 last week, we helped move forward troops, put in more barriers, and also to ensure mass deportation, support of mass deportations in support of the President's objective. That is something the Defense Department absolutely will continue to do.

And today there are more executive orders coming that we fully support on removing DEI inside the Pentagon, reinstating troops who were pushed out because of COVID mandates, Iron Dome for America. This is happening quickly. Kim, what do you make of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Senate's decision to move forward and confirm him as President Trump's nominee?

Well, as you note, it was a very close run thing. I would note that when J.D. Vance came in to cast that tie-breaking vote, that was only the second time ever that you've had a vice president had to come in and break that kind of tie. The last time was also under Donald Trump when Mike Pence in 2017 cast a tie-breaking vote for education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. I find it interesting. There was not very surprising that Susan Collins and

Lisa Murkowski from Alaska voted no. They had certainly expressed reservations. People expected them to, especially when it came to Pete Hegs' personal life, his views on women in the military, but also the allegations of alcoholism, of sexual abuse. I think what happened here, though, is that, you know, for most Republicans, the Kavanaugh hearings, the Brett Kavanaugh wildness

It ended up setting the bar a lot higher before you reach a moment in which they consider these to be credible or disqualifying, as it were. And so most people blew past that. I can tell you that there were a number of senators who really did feel some of the concern that was verbalized in the end by Mitch McConnell.

And here's another comment from McConnell. The U.S. faces coordinated aggression from adversaries bent on shattering the order underpinning American security.

and prosperity in public comments and testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mr. Hegseth did not reckon with this reality. That was a worry that a lot of Republican senators had. But here's what mattered in the end. The Trump team had pushed Hegseth forward, demanded quick action, and by pushing him to the front of the line really elevated the pressure on Republican senators not to vote against one of the first people.

And many of them decided in the end they were comfortable with the idea of a guy who had served in the military himself, had that knowledge. They believed he hopefully will have the respect of the troops, that he will also work well with other people put in the department that might have a little bit more institutional knowledge.

And so they decided to vote yes in the end. And we'll see if they then change their vote going forward when it comes to some of Trump's more controversial nominees, Tulsi Gabbard or, for instance, RFK Jr. Let me second a couple of those points. It also strikes me that the Kavanaugh hearings to confirm now Justice Brett Kavanaugh were a turning point in some of these

kinds of debates about the personal conduct of nominees, because some of those allegations that were aired in the press, sometimes by anonymous sources, were pretty wild. And it seems to me that there's a bit of lingering sense by some of these Republican senators, perhaps, that unless there is a hard claim with a date and a name attached to it, something that's been investigated, it is easy to potentially brush that kind of stuff off.

The second is, while I share the concerns that Mitch McConnell laid out there, the Pentagon is a giant bureaucracy. And to my mind,

The best nominee to disrupt it is somebody who already knows his way around the building, knows where the levers of power are. But now that we have a confirmed nominee, let's hope that Pete Hanks rises to that occasion. Meantime, Alicia, no rest for weary and cross-pressured Republican senators, because on Wednesday, the Senate is taking up confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the nation's Secretary of Health and Human Services, or HHS,

The Journal Today has an editorial under the headline, Why RFK Jr. is Dangerous for Public Health. Can you give listeners a sense of what the argument there is? Well, I think there are several reasons why he could be dangerous for public health. And part of it is the slippery manner in which he conducts himself.

And I think the editorial likens him to Anthony Fauci in that regard, in that he's completely obfuscated his anti-vaccine views. Now, there are legitimate concerns, let's put aside with some of the issues with the COVID vaccines and how they are approved for children and the boosters and the transparency and all that.

But RFK has a long history of cozying up, and he is a trial lawyer, cozying up to the trial lawyers, and basically exploiting people to enrich himself and his trial lawyer friend. He's done that as well with Glycepate, which is Roundup, the herbicide that a lot of farmers use. And

He has a long history of also embracing kind of crackpot theories, whether it be like Wi-Fi radiation can cause cancer and damage to your mitochondria. There really isn't a crackpot theory he hasn't embraced.

But just focusing in on the vaccines, he's kind of walked back his prior statements that polio, for instance, the polio vaccine may have actually killed many more people than polio, and that these vaccines are killers. Now he says that he will not take away anyone's quote unquote vaccine, and that all he cares really about is ensuring vaccine safety and that people have

all the information about the vaccines. But that's, again, fundamentally dishonest because the problem is, and we can discuss this a little more, Congress set up this program in 1986 when a lot of vaccine makers were exiting the market, especially for children's vaccines.

because they were getting swamped by these lawsuits with hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and they were losing money and they couldn't stay in. And so Congress set up this special national injury compensation program in which people who claim to have been harmed by vaccines could file claims for compensation. And this program has worked relatively well. It has reduced the amount of lawsuits against vaccine.

Because of that standard of proving your claim in federal court is actually much higher and many of them can just get just as much compensation from the government if their vaccine is on the vaccine table and injury has been actually linked. There's been definitive proof linking the injury to vaccines and there are with certain vaccines.

There's no doubt that vaccines can cause some rare side effects, but the concern is that it's HHS secretary that RFK could actually remove or at especially remove vaccines from the program and then open up the manufacturer's.

to a flood of litigation that drives them from the markets. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at LightsOnEnergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.

Welcome back. Alicia mentions that RFK Jr. seems to be softening his stance toward vaccines lately. Let's listen to him. Here he is on NBC shortly after the election. I'm not going to take away anybody's vaccines. I've never been anti-vaccine. You will not take any vaccine that is currently on the market? If vaccines are working for somebody, I'm not going to take them away.

People ought to have choice and that choice ought to be informed by the best information. So I'm going to make sure the scientific safety studies and efficacies are out there and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.

And here is Scott Gottlieb, President Trump's first director of the Food and Drug Administration in his first term, discussing his concerns last year about the Kennedy nomination to HHS. I think if RFK follows through on his intentions, and I believe he will, and I believe he can, it will cost lives in this country. You're going to see him make

You're gonna see measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination rates go down. And like I said, if we lose another 5%, which could happen in the next year or two, we will see large measles outbreaks. For every 1,000 cases of measles that occur in children, there will be one death. And we are not good in this country at diagnosing and treating measles. If you look at the outbreak in Ohio, 30% of the kids were hospitalized.

You look at the outbreak in Minnesota, 20% were hospitalized because we don't diagnose it quickly 'cause doctors aren't accustomed to seeing it. - Have we lost the ability to do it? - We lost the ability to diagnose it 'cause doctors aren't accustomed to seeing it.

Kim, these measles outbreaks in recent years are a real serious problem. And thankfully, we haven't had things like that yet with polio. But maybe on the mind of one Senator Mitch McConnell, a survivor of polio. Yeah, first of all, just to set the record straight, I think it says everything to Alicia's point about how he is slippery. The notion that he could just stand there and bald face say, I'm not anti-vaccine is ridiculous. He has spent decades

being against vaccines. So, I mean, this is the sort of character you're dealing with here at the moment. He said something else in that clip, which I think is really important and is being overlooked. He said, I'm not going to take your vaccines away from you. Instead, I'm going to make sure all the science and the studies and the research is out there so that you can make your own decision.

And I think this gets to RFK's history and background as a trial lawyer. And he's been very, very clear about his main intention, what he intends to do if he gets this job. And he said it in an interview that he did last summer with Dr. Phil. He did a long interview with him. And then he also did another interview with Jesse Waters on Fox in September.

And he said, look, I'm going to go in and my number one priority is I'm going to direct the National Institutes of Health to do real science and have them come out with real information about the dangers of all of these chemicals and compounds and what have you, whether it be high fructose corn syrup or whether it be this chemical that goes there or whether it be what's in vaccines.

And then they'll just put that information out there. And once they have proven, once that science under my direction has shown that there is a link between these compounds and diseases that we have, then the trial lawyers will come in and they'll sue and they'll sort everything out for us. And it was really interesting because Dr. Phil had posed this question. He said, like, nobody really wants to have government taking stuff away.

And our kid junior said, well, I'm not going to. The trial lawyers will do it. Like they'll come in and they'll make a, you know, I mean, he didn't say this, but they'll make a bajillion dollars just suing everything out of existence. And see, I will facilitate that. And some people will say, oh, well, you know, if it's the science is the science. And I ask our conservative listeners to think about that statement as we have long talked about.

The ability to capture government scientists and sort of direct the science the way you would like it to go is something that Republicans have had a lot of concerns about over the years, in particular with regards to climate science, for instance. Or more recently, look at all the, quote, science we had coming out of the federal government with regard to COVID and mask wearing and everything else.

So his goal here is to go in, use the scientists in the federal government, direct them to put things out that will be helpful to the trial lawyers and to his long-term ambitions. And that to me is the real danger. And yes, it will affect vaccines.

And yes, that is a very dangerous prospect, but it will affect all kinds of other things too. I mean, things, by the way, I would just note, I mean, one of the other things that RFK Jr. can't stand is some of these weight loss drugs that are out there right now. He thinks that they're wrong, they're problematic, and wait for the quote science to flow on why all of these are bad for the public health. I went looking for some numbers this morning on this National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

as it's called. And I found this from the Health Resources and Services Administration. It says, according to the CDC, from 2006 to 2022, over 5 billion doses of covered vaccines were distributed in the United States for petitions filed in this time period. 12,499 petitions were adjudicated by the court and of those, 9,075 were compensated. This

This means for every million doses of vaccine that were distributed, approximately one individual was compensated. So Alicia, that helps explain what Congress was trying to do, the economic thinking behind this no-fault program. Because if there are rare side effects to vaccines,

But there is a huge benefit to 5 billion doses of vaccines for all kinds of things going out to the public over the course of 20 or 30 or 40 years, like tetanus and hepatitis and measles.

MMRs, rotavirus, rubella, just looking at the list here, it makes sense to compensate those people without necessarily having some kind of huge jury trial and award where you're having to prove the causation. By the way, this fact sheet from the government says that about 60% of all compensation is as a result of negotiated settlements.

So that is not a situation where there is some sort of fact finder who has said, yes, this vaccine has caused your injury. It's basically a way to pay people who say they have an injury without bogging down the overall process of getting vaccines approved and out to the public where there's huge benefit for them. And if I'm understanding you right, Alicia, as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. would have the ability to potentially

take vaccines out of this compensation program. So he could say, this vaccine from this maker, you're going back into the regular courts, the regular trial lawyer and tort system. Right. So how this works is that the HHS secretary

can remove vaccines from this program. Currently, you can already sue the manufacturers after you go through these special vaccine courts. The vaccine courts are designed to actually be more favorable to the patients who claim to have been injured. Basically, there's a

presumption, if you have certain a certain injury, or it can show proof that you had a vaccine on a certain date, and then develop a certain side effect within a certain period of time that the vaccine was the cause and you will get an automatic payout based on whatever economic injuries or medical costs that you suffered as a result.

And this is, again, this has worked relatively well. And very rarely do you actually get lawsuits outside of these boards. We have seen this now with RFK, who has actually championed a lawsuit against the Gardasil, the HPV vaccine.

with his trial lawyer friends, which is actually now going to federal court. And the claim actually in this one is that Merck somehow concealed the actual potential side effects of the vaccine, wasn't honest about it with patients. And the FDA kind of went along with

days. And I raised this example because that is the concern is you're going to get more of those kinds of lawsuits if he becomes HHS secretary, because he's going to basically say, well, the FDA concealed this evidence of side effects. And of course,

It's very difficult to actually prove an injury was directly caused by something. A lot of people develop injuries regardless if it was caused by a vaccine or a drug. You may have a stroke, but there is an exhaustive review required of data points. The U.S. FDA actually works with the Europeans to look at all these potentially injuries and if there's any kind of link to the vaccine.

The concern is that, to Kim's point, that there will be some kind of manipulation of this data to say that these vaccines are actually causing certain injuries. The autism link, for instance, is a case in point. You know, a lot of kids, they're usually diagnosed with autism around the same time as, you know, they're going through and getting all their shots. And just because they were diagnosed with autism, you know, within a month or two of getting a shot doesn't mean that one causes another. Right.

But the concern here is that Kennedy will add more injuries to this vaccine program or remove vaccines from the program, again, opening it up to more litigation or opening up the vaccine program to essentially bankruptcy because it's going to have to pay out all kinds of claims for anyone who suffered any kind of harm or after getting a vaccine. Hang tight. We'll be right back after one more break.

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Welcome back. Kim, a couple of final thoughts here from me, and then we'll give you the last word. There are also, by the way, allegations about RFK Jr.'s personal behavior. He said last year, this is the quote, I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that I'm not going to be able to get out of my closet.

that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world. So if skeletons in a closet are the kind of thing that might lead a Susan Collins or a Lisa Murkowski to vote no on a Pete Hegseth, there is also that potentially here with RFK Jr.'s nomination. Also, I understand why Trump nominated RFK Jr., the deal,

between Trump and RFK was that RFK would endorse the Trump campaign in 2024, maybe bring along some supporters in some of these swing states that were thought to be relatively close at the time. And then he would play some kind of large role in the administration with a health portfolio. Some of the issues that RFK has been interested in in a

long while. But the Republican Senate is not party to that deal. If you are a senator, your interest is, it seems to me, in making sure that that nominee, if confirmed, would do the best job and put the public interest first.

And then one final thought before I get off my soapbox, Kim, is RFK Jr. for a long time was a popular figure on the left. There were rumors at one point he was going to be President Obama's EPA administrator. So that's part of what makes this hard for me to calculate out is, is there some possibility that he might still get a Democratic vote or two?

So the Senate is not party to this deal. But I would also point all those Republican senators or if any are listening to please just look at the recent Trump maneuverings within the transition team to attempt to box in RFK Jr. If he actually is confirmed, they are concerned about this.

OK, look, this was a transactional deal. It was like RFK endorsed Donald Trump and Donald Trump felt he had to give him something. Is Donald Trump as invested in this nomination as he was, for instance, in Pete Hague said? Absolutely not. In fact, if you squint a little and listen hard, you could almost hear the transition begging the Senate to potentially get them out of this situation.

And, you know, I think all these senators, Republican senators are worried about getting crosswise with Donald Trump. I think they might get a thank you card if they were to actually get RFK off this because his nomination is a mess. It's not just all the things that we talked about. But as you mentioned, Kyle, I mean, if you really want to look at personal behavior and background, this guy could win awards. I mean, it's

And if people were really digging into it, it would make Kavanaugh or Pete Hegseth seem tame. But it's been so overshadowed by some of his controversial views that his biography has not been getting much attention. I agree that there is some wildcard questions here. I could see there being more than enough Republicans to potentially derail this nomination, maybe. But then you add in the possibility that he could get some Democratic votes.

I don't know where they're come from. A lot of Democrats have really come down on him hard. And you can see Elizabeth Warren, she is gearing up to grill him. A couple I would name. I mean, there's people that were looking at John Fetterman from Pennsylvania only because he's made a kind of public pledge that he wants to have an open mind about Donald Trump's nominees. Bernie Sanders has in the

past said some nice things about RFK Jr., but it's sometimes hard to see him being too far off the page of an Elizabeth Warren. One other long shot is Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, because he and RFK Jr. were law school buddies.

and they have a very long time friendship. And RFK Jr. has actually campaigned at times for Sheldon Whitehouse. He's been very quiet on how he's going to go on this nomination, and that's one to watch as well. I think that this is going to be even more of a up in the air. We could, after

his hearings, watch his hearings. I mean, a lot of people are waiting just to see what he does in these hearings. This is not a man known for his circumspection. We'll see how he manages a couple of days in the public spotlight. He could sink himself still. Thank you, Kim and Alicia. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button, and we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch.

America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at LightsOnEnergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.