Cabinet confirmation hearings began in Washington last week for several of President Trump’s picks for top jobs in government. While Marco Rubio passed the gauntlet, we’re still waiting on word of a scheduled hearing for Trump’s most controversial picks: Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. 

RFK’s confirmation will be a blockbuster show of D.C. division, and it should be. The Kennedy heir is not aligned with the MAGA agenda.

Confirmation hearings are famously scripted and predictable. Republicans and Democrats play impressed ally or suspicious truth-seeker for the C-SPAN cameras and bank as many loaded questions as they can for their future campaign ads showing them as fighters. We don’t know what will happen with several nominees, RFK most of all.

The Democrat attorney-turned-failed presidential candidate and successor to the Kennedy family dynasty is maybe the second-most gonzo political figure of our time, behind only Trump. Barack Obama wanted him to head the EPA back in 2008, and today you can find him discussed on Joe Rogan and labeled “the most erudite” and “shrewd” lawyer who has “never lost a case,” according to actor and director Mel Gibson.

For Democrats, there is skepticism about his somewhat fringe views on vaccines and willingness to flirt with conspiracy theories, whether or not they agree with his overall health agenda. Hawaii Democratic Gov. Josh Green called Kennedy “dangerous,” at the same time New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker seems to be on board with Kennedy’s plan for nutrition and public health.

Republican senators are similarly confused about how to approach voting for Kennedy.

Gibson wasn’t wrong. RFK is a seasoned environmental activist and attorney who has worked overtime to foil the GOP’s pro-market policy agenda, and it’s still unclear if he believes in the weaponization of government power to carry out his more progressive ideology. For years, RFK’s public statements demonstrate his instinct toward an interventionist progressive government that could “prosecute” Americans deemed climate skeptics and jail the GOP megadonor Charles Koch in the Hague as a “war criminal.”

RFK had a direct hand in halting some vital energy projects that practically every Republican or conservative would be appalled by blocking today.

In his home state of New York, Kennedy succeeded in shutting down not only natural gas fracking but also the shutdown of the carbon-free Indian Point nuclear reactor. He sued to stop hydroelectricity projects in Canada, the Dakota Access pipeline, and even wind farms off the Massachusetts coast.

The organization he represented for years, the National Resources Defense Council, has been a principal player in trying to kill the forestry indistry in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, which supplies most of the lumber in American homes.

These are serious red flags that demonstrate a value misalignment.

RFK’s MAGA conversion came about thanks only to political convenience. He committed ‘wrongthink’ during the COVID pandemic and needed a new home for his multimillion-dollar activism.

For Republican senators who support the broader aims of MAGA, shouldn’t RFK’s past exploits in courtrooms, legislatures and interviews play a bigger part in whether he’s the right pick for the job to run the country’s largest federal bureaucracy?

His boosters will say that RFK’s focus will be limited to public health and nutrition, but if the Joe Biden years have taught us anything, it’s just how intrusive and all-encompassing an agency like HHS can be. Trump vows he’ll “keep Bobby away from the liquid gold,” meaning oil and gas exploration, but there is no erasing the environmental lawyer’s decades-long record of depriving Americans of more affordable energy.

Right now, environmental activists are launching costly and damaging lawsuits against energy firms claiming their products are damaging Americans’ health and that of future generations. HHS could absolutely play a part in this effort to hamstring U.S. oil and gas, and RFK’s record suggests he would support it.

For these reasons, RFK is a puzzling pick for a rare moment where Republicans hold a trifecta majority in government. There’s no time to waste in making the most of Trump’s agenda. Republicans and Democrats, especially conservatives, should be preparing tough questions for RFK that go beyond cable news theatrics.

Originally published in DC Journal (archive #1, #2).