Impeachment Articles Filed Against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

I recently wrote about the absurdity of the Democratic effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. I have also opposed Republican calls to impeach judges. Impeachment mania has returned for the midterm elections. However, on the scale of utter lunacy, the call to impeach Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes the cake.

This effort is being led by Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who is running for Senate and has decided that the best way to achieve that distinction is to turn the constitutional process into a mockery.In academic writings, testimony (including at the impeachment hearings of Clinton, Trump, and Biden), and litigation (as the lead counsel in the last judicial impeachment trial), I have long argued against such ill-defined articles for impeachment.Stevens is seeking to impeach Kennedy for turning “his back on science”:

“Today, I formally introduced articles of impeachment against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. RFK Jr. has turned his back on science and the safety of the American people. Michiganders cannot take another day of his chaos.”

Many Americans welcome Kennedy’s efforts to make food healthier and to challenge the status quo at HHS. Others, like Stevens, have strong objections to those policies. This is a good-faith and worthy debate for us to have. For years, there was little debate on such questions.

Indeed, in the prior Administration, to challenge prevailing expert opinion was to risk being labeled a wingnut or conspiracist. The very same people who are calling for Kennedy’s head were part of the mob denouncing dissenters in the scientific community, or those who remained silent as scientists were fired, censored, and cancelled.

The most anti-science position was to demand compliance with the orthodoxy of the pandemic years. Take Jay Bhattacharya, who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration and was a vocal critic of COVID-19 policies.

Bhattacharya is now the 18th director of the National Institutes of Health and is working with Kennedy to change the culture of groupthink among health researchers and regulators in the government.

Bhattacharya was censored, blacklisted, and vilified due to his opposing views on health policy, including opposing wholesale shutdowns of schools and businesses. He was recently honored with the prestigious “Intellectual Freedom” award from the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.

He was one of many who were blacklisted for challenging pandemic policies. It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses.

Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government.

Others questioned the six-foot rule, which shut down many businesses, as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did it result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, but the media further ostracized dissenting critics.

Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result was massive social and economic costs.

The point is that these attacks were “turning your back on science” by crushing dissent and stopping any meaningful debate on these issues. These same figures were wrong on the science, but now seek to lead another mob to impeach those seeking to change policies and practices at HHS and NIH.

Democrats clearly oppose Kennedy’s initiatives. Fine. Use legislation and the power of the purse to push back on those efforts if you have a majority in Congress. What you should not do is use impeachment to achieve what you could not achieve during the confirmation process.

Many on the left appear to have a particular hatred for Kennedy as a type of fallen angel, a progressive from an iconic Democratic family who rejected the party’s intolerance and direction. Hell hath no fury like a party scorned.

The pledges of new impeachments are ominous going into the midterm elections, where Democrats appear to be promising more of the same dysfunctional efforts to use this constitutional process for raw partisan advantage. Even with those who oppose Trump Administration policies, it is hard to believe that a majority of Americans want to return to the same chaos of the first term.