Democratic Senator Ready to Do Dumbest Thing (Vote to Confirm RFK Jr.)

While it seems likely that the lion’s share of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees are going to sail through their confirmation hearings, the fortunes of three of his picks—Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence prospect Tulsi Gabbard, and would-be Department of Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—remain somewhat cloudy. Hegseth, of late, has emerged as the likeliest of the three to get over the line.

But according to a fresh report from Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, another may be edging closer: Kennedy Jr. And the reason RFK’s chances have slightly improved have nothing to do with the nominee sanding down his fringe ideas about vaccines and modern medicine, and everything to do with the fact that Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, while not “confirmed as voting for Kennedy” nevertheless “appears to be actively considering it.”

Naturally, the reasons why, given the high stakes, are both indescribably stupid and yet very typical of the way Washington works. As Marshall reports:

I’m told that there appear to be two reasons: One is that Whitehouse and Kennedy are personal friends. They were law school roommates at UVA and that seems to have been the beginning of a lifelong friendship. There are also specific issues with Rhode Island’s health care system that apparently need regulatory flexibility from HHS. That seems to be a real issue. But it hasn’t been enough of an issue to shift the state’s senior senator, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), who remains firmly opposed to Kennedy’s nomination.

Why would it matter if Whitehouse bucks common sense and votes to install RFK in Trump’s Cabinet? As Marshall points out, support for Kennedy among Republican senators is fluid for all the reasons you might expect (not everyone wants to see long-conquered childhood diseases make a comeback in this, the twenty-first century). But Whitehouse’s support may go a long way toward providing some of the fence-sitters some political cover to back Trump’s man.

During his visit to North Carolina Friday, Donald Trump floated the idea of making changes to how the federal government responds to natural disasters—including getting rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

“We’re looking at the whole concept of FEMA. I like, frankly, the concept when North Carolina gets hit, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it. Meaning the state takes care of it,” Trump told reporters on the tarmac in Asheville, citing the effects of Hurricanes Helene and Milton on the southwestern U.S. last year.

Trump also said that disaster aid for North Carolina and California,  both of which happen to be states with Democratic governors, would go directly through his administration rather than FEMA. Later, meeting with local officials during his visit, Trump said he’d be signing an executive order to begin reforming or even getting rid of the agency.

“I think, frankly, FEMA is not good,” Trump said. “FEMA has turned out to be a disaster…. I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”

Eliminating the agency altogether would require congressional approval, and would result in more than 20,000 federal employees losing their jobs. Trump also discussed getting rid of FEMA on Wednesday in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, saying that he’d “rather see the states take care of their own problems.” 

But between 2015 and 2024, Republican-led states such as Florida, Texas, and Louisiana received the majority of federal disaster aid. Any cuts to FEMA would end up affecting states that voted for him in the last three presidential elections. Perhaps Trump sees this as an acceptable price for the power to restrict aid to other places whenever he pleases.

Trump still wants to hold California wildfire disaster aid hostage until the state government capitulates to his personal agenda.

Ahead of a planned trip to the state on Friday, a reporter asked the president very directly if he would “withhold funding to Los Angeles because of its sanctuary city policy.”

“I want to see two things in Los Angeles. Voter ID, so that the people have a chance to vote, and I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state,” Trump responded, ignoring the actual question while adding even more conditions to federal aid. “Those are the two things. After that, I will be the greatest president that California has ever seen.”

Trump went on to ramble about the abject beauty of the California terrain before returning to his thesis.

“I want voter ID for the people of California; they all want it, right now.… People want to have voter identification, you want to have proof of citizenship, ideally you have one-day voting … but I just want voter ID as a start, and I want the water to be released, and they’re gonna get a lot of help from the U.S.”

Voter ID law has nothing to do with the wildfires, or with getting federal assistance to California—it’s just one of many demands Republicans want California to meet before they dole out the funds they’ve been dangling over the state.

When asked moments later about the requirement, Trump seemed to imply that there would be no conditions on aid to North Carolina, which is still recovering from Hurricane Helene. But California was a different story: “In California, I have a condition. We want them to have voter ID,” he reiterated.

On Trump’s desire for the water to “come down into Los Angeles”: The president has repeatedly accused the California state government of refusing to send water from Northern California to fight the fires, saying that they’re ignoring Southern California to protect the delta smelt, a kind of fish.

“Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it,” Trump said on Tuesday. “All they have to do is turn the valve, and that’s the valve coming back from and down from the Pacific Northwest, where millions of gallons of water a week and a day, even, in many cases, pours into California, goes all through California down to Los Angeles. And they turned it off.”

It’s nowhere near as simple as he describes it, and there is no “valve.” The hydrants were overworked, not shut off. Nor did the smelt have anything to do with the lack of water to the south—high demand and low pressure did. “There’s literally no real connection between the fires in Southern California and delta smelt protections,” said the Center for Biological Diversity’s John Buse.

While taking questions from the press at Asheville Airport, in Fletcher, North Carolina, Trump was asked to comment on the removal of the security detail charged with protecting his former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“You know, when you work for government, at some point your security detail comes off. And you know, you can’t have ’em forever. So I think it’s very standard,” Trump said.

“If it would be for somebody else, you wouldn’t be asking the question,” Trump said. “I think the question is very fair.

“You can’t have a security detail for the rest of your life because you work for government,” Trump added.

Trump’s previous efforts to discredit and demonize Fauci give the removal of his security detail a distinctly more sinister connotation.

As recently as August, Trump shared a picture of Fauci in an orange jumpsuit, during a particularly violent tirade on Truth Social. Biden issued a last-minute pardon for Fauci ahead of Trump’s inauguration Monday, likely crushing Trump’s dreams of seeing the former health official behind bars. Taking away his safety might be the next best thing.

In the past week Trump has pettily removed the security details of his former national security adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—two administration officials who had openly criticized Trump—despite warnings from the Biden administration that both were still receiving threats against their safety.

In Fauci’s memoir, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, he detailed Trump’s volatile behavior and his abusive treatment of the embattled former health official. He also exposed just how desperate the president was to reopen the country through the embrace of poorly qualified advisers pushing unproven treatments.

The Trump administration is embracing a dark loophole to justify the executive’s attempts to dismantle birthright citizenship.

Donald Trump’s Justice Department cited an archaic statute in a legal filing Wednesday, arguing that the president’s executive order ending constitutionally guaranteed birthright citizenship should be totally kosher, since the children of Native Americans weren’t historically considered citizens, either.

The department cited Elk v. Wilkins, a landmark 1884 case in which the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that Native Americans could not vote since they owed “immediate allegiance” to their tribes rather than the United States, even if they were born on American soil. (To rectify this, Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 to extend citizenship to Native Americans who had been precluded from the Constitution’s protections.)

But according to Trump’s administration, the ancient ruling opens up the possibility that some individuals born within the nation’s boundaries “are not constitutionally entitled to citizenship.”

“Indian tribes occupy an intermediate position between foreign States and U.S. States,” the Justice Department wrote in a motion opposing a temporary restraining order on Trump’s executive missive. “The United States’ connection with the children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors is weaker than its connection with members of Indian tribes. If the latter link is insufficient for birthright citizenship, the former certainly is.”

The forty-seventh president’s move to end birthright citizenship was blocked by a federal judge on Thursday, who deemed the executive order as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

“I have been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear,” Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, said, adding that it “boggled” his mind that anyone in the legal profession would believe the order could pass muster with the U.S. Constitution.

“Where were the lawyers?” when the order was made and signed, the judge asked.

Birthright citizenship is baked into the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to everyone born or naturalized on U.S. soil.

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” the text of the amendment reads.