Tempers ran high during a chaotic July 20 hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the star witness.
Mr. Kennedy, one of three declared candidates for the 2024 Democratic primary, along with President Joe Biden and author Marianne Williamson, has become anathema to others in his party for his oppositional position on COVID-19 policy and vaccine efficacy. The candidate, son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, has called for enhanced vaccine safety screening and has expressed doubts about the business practices of the pharmaceutical industry as a whole.
On July 20, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) subcommittee heard testimony from Mr. Kennedy in a hearing themed around reports of social media censorship in collusion with government forces, which Mr. Kennedy says he has faced for challenging the official narrative about the pandemic and vaccines.
Democrats spent much of the hearing seeking to discredit and de-platform Mr. Kennedy, citing remarks he made during an appearance in New York last week.
In a secretly recorded video, Mr. Kennedy was heard describing research showed COVID-19 virus disproportionately affected Caucasian and black people while being comparably mild for Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, who Mr. Kennedy suggested had a stronger immune response to the virus and were better able to fight it off. Mr. Kennedy also discussed how bioweapons could potentially be designed with the intent to harm certain ethnic groups over others.
The comments nevertheless created a firestorm among Democrats and other Kennedy critics, who condemned the comments as “racist” and “antisemitic.”
“The hearing that we have this week is about censorship,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters when asked about the letter. “I don’t think censoring somebody is actually the answer here.”
Democrats Slash RFK Opening Statement Time
After the effort failed to have Mr. Kennedy uninvited from the hearing, Democrats nevertheless spent a great deal of time during the hearing seeking to limit Mr. Kennedy’s testimony and discredit the president’s most formidable challenger from within his party.As soon as Mr. Kennedy and other witnesses were sworn in, Democrats made their first point of order of the hearing, calling for the time given to Mr. Kennedy during his opening statement to be slashed.
Though five minutes is the standard time allotted for speakers in House hearings, the clock initially displayed 10 minutes for Mr. Kennedy, leading to a heated exchange over the matter between Mr. Jordan and Ms. Plaskett.
“Is it ten or five?” Ms. Plaskett could be heard asking Mr. Jordan as Mr. Kennedy began to speak.
“He’s gonna go a little longer,” Mr. Jordan replied.
At that point, Ms. Plaskett interrupted with a point of order, demanding that Mr. Kennedy have his time slashed in half as per the standard procedure.
“I know that witnesses usually have five minutes; I see 10 minutes on the board. Is it going to be 10 minutes?” she asked.
“We'll give him five minutes, but we’re pretty lax with this—” Mr. Jordan began.
“We are?” Ms. Plaskett interjected. “I’ve seen you pound the gavel down on quite a number of witnesses.”
Mr. Jordan replied that he had given others, including Democrats, additional time to speak in the past when needed.
Nevertheless, Mr. Jordan acceded to the point of order, saying, “We'll give him five minutes. And if you wanna cut him off and censor him some more, you’re welcome to do it,” prompting a ripple of laughter from the audience.
Despite her posturing, Ms. Plaskett ultimately allowed Mr. Kennedy to go over time in his remarks.
Wasserman-Schultz Tries to End Hearing
As Mr. Kennedy finished his opening remarks, receiving a round of applause from audience members, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.) put forward another point of order, calling for the hearing to be moved to executive session—a move that would have closed the hearing off from the public view.“Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly made despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian remarks as recently as last week,” Ms. Wasserman-Schultz said, citing an obscure interpretative section of House rules that she said Mr. Kennedy’s remarks violated.
That rule allows a committee to move into executive session if public airing of the testimony “would tend to defame, degrade, or incriminate any person, or otherwise would violate a law or rule of the House.”
Ms. Wasserman-Schultz contended that Mr. Kennedy’s comments about COVID constituted a violation of these rules.
As Ms. Wasserman-Schultz read out the alleged remarks made by Mr. Kennedy, who has said they were taken out of context to defame him, Mr. Jordan interjected, “Is the gentlelady making a motion or a speech?”
Before Ms. Wasserman-Schultz had finished speaking, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) put forward a motion to shelve the motion.
In a recorded vote, all 10 Republicans present at the hearing voted to shelve Ms. Wasserman-Schultz’s motion, while all eight Democrats present voted against it.
Mr. Massie said, “Yes, to not censor,” when asked for his vote.
“No to allowing a witness to violate the rules and not have his testimony and degradation amplified,” Ms. Wasserman-Schultz said.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said he was voting “No to the Soviet Politburo,” intimating that, by allowing Mr. Kennedy to speak in a public format, Congress was conducting itself in a similar fashion to the repressive central policy arm of the Soviet Union.
Similarly, Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.) said he was voting “No to hate speech.”
“Is it the custom of this committee to censor viewpoints we disagree with?” Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) asked ahead of the vote.
Later in the hearing, Mr. Massie said that “the irony and cognitive dissonance from the other side of the aisle is deafening.
“This is a hearing on censorship that began with an effort, with a formal motion from the other side of the aisle to censor Mr. Kennedy.”
Blocked From Citing Studies
Later, Ms. Wasserman-Schultz began her questioning by requesting again, as her party had earlier, that Mr. Kennedy’s invitation to appear be revoked “due to his repeated and very recent statements that spread dangerous and antisemitic conspiracy theories.“His reckless rhetoric helped fuel antisemitic incidents, which—for the record—are at the highest level in the United States since 1970,” she said.
She suggested that Mr. Kennedy’s earlier comments on the relative severity of the COVID virus across racial lines was comparable to claims prevalent during the Middle Ages that Jews were responsible for diseases like the Black Death.
But when Mr. Kennedy went to respond with a clarification of his earlier remarks, citing a specific study funded by the National Institutes of Health which suggested that there are indeed different levels of severity of the virus across different racial groups, Ms. Wasserman-Schultz cut him off, reclaiming her time.
“You’re slandering me, indirectly,” Mr. Kennedy said, demanding that he be allowed to speak.
“You did not cite any study in your earlier remarks,” Ms. Wasserman-Schultz said. “You’re trying to re-write history here.”
‘Free Speech Is Not Absolute’
Several Democrats across the hearing cast doubt on the scope of free speech and what it means in practice.“Free speech is not absolute,” Ms. Plaskett said.
Allowing Mr. Kennedy to speak to the panel, Ms. Plaskett said, is “not the kind of speech I know.”
Specifically, she contended that, while acknowledging that Mr. Kennedy’s speech was protected by the First Amendment, Mr. Kennedy had no right to receive a platform for that speech through Congress.
She said she was “appalled” that “we are creating a platform for this kind of discussion—not about free speech ... but the content of some of that speech that we are amplifying in this room.”
She cited Mr. Kennedy’s alleged endorsement of a video comparing the COVID vaccine to the Tuskegee experiments on black people, saying Mr. Kennedy “manipulates and preys” on black people’s feelings about the issue. Ms. Plaskett suggested that Mr. Kennedy was indirectly promoting eugenicist and racial science ideas about black people by raising alarms about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
Mr. Kennedy replied during later questioning that these remarks were defamatory and “simply inaccurate.”
As Mr. Kennedy spoke, defending himself from these charges and additional allegations of being “anti-vax,” Ms. Plaskett interrupted, leading Mr. Massie to comment, “It’s the witness’s time, please don’t censor him.”
Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) later repeated Ms. Plaskett’s claim about rights, saying that one of the first things she learned in law school was that “no right enjoyed by the American people is absolute—that includes the right to free speech.
“Because you do not have the right to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater because it could produce harm and death to people by being false,” Ms. Sanchez said.
The allusion was to Mr. Kennedy’s positions on the COVID vaccine, which have seen him face varying levels of adverse action by social media platforms. The intimation of Ms. Sanchez’s comment was that removing content deemed “false” by social media platforms was legally permissible under the First Amendment.
“We are not trying to censor speech; we are simply trying to create factually correct information to prevent harm to people, including death,” she said. “That’s what they were trying to do during COVID.”
“Hate speech has consequences. Distortion of the truth has consequences,” Mr. Connolly said later on the same note.
“It’s not censorship to try to correct that record.”
“Vaccination denial would have cost millions of more lives in America,” he said. “Protective measures were taken to take down disinformation about the vaccine, and the virus, and about protective measures we could take, including masks, including social distancing.”
“Censorship” was also a common theme among Democrats during the hearing, as they sought to accuse Republicans of censoring them.
Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) noted that, due to the late finish of the first round of the hearing, she had missed two votes, which she said “censored the voice of my constituents.”
After Ms. Sanchez exceeded her time, Mr. Jordan moved on to the next member, prompting additional cries of “censorship by the chair” from Ms. Garcia.
Despite congressional Democrats’ opposition, Mr. Kennedy enjoys much better approval among Democrat voters.
Still, Mr. Kennedy faces long odds in his path to the nomination, as Democrats do not plan to give him or Ms. Williamson a platform to debate Mr. Biden in 2024.
