Things got very entertaining in Congress on Thursday, April 16, when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. appeared for testimony and questions before the House Ways and Means Committee, kicking off his appearance before a whopping seven budget hearings this week.
As could be expected, the hearing turned into a total circus that saw grandstanding Democrats trying to make ridiculous talking points about him as he easily fended off their interrogations with vigor and slammed their ridiculous questioning generally, all of which was very entertaining, such as his fight with Rep. Sewell (D-AL).
During his appearance before the committee, Secretary Kennedy emphasized and highlighted how HHS is working with the administration to crack down on the massive problem of waste, fraud, and abuse while also doing somewhat more typical and expected tasks, such as reforming dietary guidelines.
That turned, as could be expected, into the usual sort of congressional battle. Committee Republicans praised him for doing such a good job, while Democrats needled and attacked him for the policies in which he and his department are engaging, particularly his budget cuts of various HHS programs.
Rep. Sewell’s freakout over Kennedy’s appearance came when she attacked him for comments he made last July, on the “High Level Conversations” podcast. He said, “Psychiatric drugs — which every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented to live in a community where there’ll be no cellphones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”
It began with Sewell berating him for serving as the HHS Secretary despite not having a medical degree and not being a doctor, an absurd point that he brushed off with ease, telling her that a whopping 24 out of the past 26 HHS Secretaries have not had such degrees, and that he is thus unexceptional in that regard.
Then she started berating him over his parenting comments. She snapped, “Have you ever re-parented, or parented, I should say, a black child?” As she did so, her team held up a sign with an incorrectly paraphrased version of what he had said on the podcast about teens pushed onto medications needing to be taken off of them.
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Pushing back, Secretary Kennedy said that he had no idea what she was talking about and that he wouldn’t speak to what he hadn’t said. “I don’t even know what that phrase means. I’m not going to answer something I didn’t say,” Secretary Kennedy shot back at the representative.
Rep. Sewell got angry and snapped at him, leading to Secretary Kennedy firing back, “I’d like to hear the recording! I don’t even know what it means!” He added, really getting her goat, “You’re making stuff up.” Watch them snap at each other over the re-parenting issue here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video