RFK Jr.’s Big Day
True to form: Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—President Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, which oversees the administration of Medicare and Medicaid, and thus receives a massive chunk of the federal budget—was grilled by senators on the Senate Finance Committee for three hours as part of his confirmation hearings. They interrogated his stance on abortion, his possible role in measles vaccine refusal in Samoa (where an outbreak then killed 83 people), and his collection of fees for clients referred to a law firm suing Merck, the makers of the Gardasil vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer. (“You’re making me sound like a shill,” he told Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) when she pressed him on that last point.)
Today, he will face questions from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, but yesterday’s hearing was much more important since it’s the Finance Committee that votes on sending Kennedy’s nomination to the Senate floor for a full vote.
Kennedy appeared to do a good job winning over necessary Republican support and pandering to their interests. When asked “Are you a conspiracy theorist?” he had a fairly smooth response, talking about how the term is used to denigrate people “asking difficult questions of powerful interests.”
Later on, it became clear that Kennedy didn’t really know much about the programs he would be tasked with overseeing. “The premiums are too high, the deductibles are too high, and everybody’s getting sicker,” he said of Medicaid, a program for which people by and large don’t pay premiums or deductibles.
Tragic collision: Last night, an American Airlines jet carrying 64 people flying from Wichita, Kansas, to D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport collided in midair with a Black Hawk military helicopter carrying three people. Both aircraft went down, and a search and rescue effort in the Potomac River has started. Many are feared dead.
The Black Hawk was doing routine flying exercises before returning to a nearby base. The commercial plane was carrying more than a dozen figure skaters, of American and Russian origin, returning
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