{"id":4664,"date":"2025-01-09T18:18:44","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T18:18:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/rfk-jr-is-seeing-how-far-the-kennedy-name-will-take-him\/"},"modified":"2025-01-09T18:18:44","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T18:18:44","slug":"rfk-jr-is-seeing-how-far-the-kennedy-name-will-take-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/rfk-jr-is-seeing-how-far-the-kennedy-name-will-take-him\/","title":{"rendered":"RFK Jr. is seeing how far the Kennedy name will take him"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Winning the votes of two of the leaders of the anti-Trump resistance in the Senate would seem like a long shot for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his bid to win confirmation as President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s secretary of health and human services.<\/p>\n

Then again, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are Democrats who represent Massachusetts, and Kennedy is\u2026 a Kennedy, the son of a Democratic senator and nephew of two other Democratic senators.<\/p>\n

Kennedy\u2019s decision to meet with the Bay State\u2019s Senate delegation on Thursday shows, to some political insiders, the lasting power of the Kennedy name in the state, which launched the political careers of Kennedy\u2019s namesake father and uncles John F. Kennedy and Edward Kennedy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Kennedy name is still strong and has a lot of lasting power in the Bay State,\u201d said Brad Bannon, longtime Massachusetts pollster and CEO of Bannon Communications Research. \u201cIt\u2019s smart politics for Kennedy \u2014 and Warren and Markey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before he dropped his own presidential bid over the summer, Kennedy was polling in the high single digits<\/u><\/a> in a matchup with Trump and President Joe Biden in Massachusetts. He ultimately did not appear on the state\u2019s ballot.<\/p>\n

Markey and Warren voted for very few of Trump\u2019s first term nominees, even compared with their other Democratic colleagues.<\/p>\n

A Markey spokesperson said the senator is \u201chearing from his constituents about Mr. Kennedy\u2019s nomination, as well as all of Trump\u2019s nominees,\u201d and that he\u2019s meeting with many other nominees.<\/p>\n

Markey, who upset one of Kennedy\u2019s nephews, Joseph P. Kennedy III, to win his Senate seat in 2020, haspreviously said Kennedy<\/u><\/a> is an \u201cunqualified, unserious and dangerous\u201d choice for HHS. And Warren has saidshe would laugh at the nomination<\/u><\/a> \u201cif it weren\u2019t so scary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even many of Kennedy\u2019sown family members<\/u><\/a> have decried his run for president and later endorsement of Trump.<\/p>\n

But the Kennedy legacy remains strong \u2014 even beyond Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who sits on the Finance Committee that will have to approve Kennedy\u2019s nomination before it goes to the Senate floor, told reporters that he and Kennedy had \u201csome interesting conversations\u201d about the senator\u2019s experience with Kennedy\u2019s uncle Edward, who served as a Massachusetts senator for nearly five decades and was the second-most senior senator when he died in 2009.<\/p>\n

He was \u201csort of the lion of the Senate back when I first got here,\u201d Cornyn said. \u201cAnd what a larger than life personality he was.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Winning the votes of two of the leaders of the anti-Trump resistance in the Senate would seem like a long shot for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his bid to win confirmation as President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s secretary of health and human services. Then again, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are Democrats who represent Massachusetts, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}