House Democrats on Thursday tried unsuccessfully to remove Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. from a hearing on federal government censorship, after claiming he was in violation of House rules aimed at preventing defamatory or degrading testimony.
That effort and others by Democrats to silence him at the hearing prompted RFK, Jr. to say, “This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.”
RFK, Jr., who is running for president against President Biden, was invited by Republicans to testify at a hearing at the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. But after his opening remarks, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., moved to take the hearing into executive session to discuss RFK, Jr.’s alleged violation of a House rule aimed at banning testimony that defames or degrades others.
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Wasserman Schultz said the witness made “despicable” antisemitic and anti-Asian comments in the last few days, referring to his comment that COVID may have been “ethnically targeted” because those who are most immune to COVID appear to be Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. RFK, Jr. later said he was not accusing anyone of deliberately engineering COVID to spare certain ethnic populations.
Wasserman Schultz’s move to halt the hearing and go to executive session was voted down 10-8 thanks to the Republican majority in the committee. Some Democrats made comments like “no to hate speech” as they voted against the GOP push to kill Wasserman Schultz’s motion.
Democrats also tried to limit RFK, Jr.’s remarks right from the start by noting that Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who chairs the subcommittee, planned to give him 10 minutes to speak. Stacey Plaskett, the Democrat delegate from the Virgin Islands, asked why he should get 10 minutes when witnesses usually get 5 minutes.
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When Jordan said the committee often lets lawmakers and former lawmakers speak for a longer time, Plaskett said, “He’s neither.”
Jordan acquiesced to giving him 5 minutes on the clock, and said to Plaskett, “If you want to cut him off and censor him some more, you’re welcome to do it.”
“Oh, that’s not my job,” Plaskett said. “That’s your job. Why don’t you threaten the witness so that they do not want to be a witness.”
RFK, Jr. used his opening remarks to lament the Democrats’ efforts to censor his speech, and broader efforts to censor his run for the White House. He said his speech announcing his candidacy was censored five minutes into his speech by YouTube.
“Censorship is antithetical to our party,” he said. “It was appalling to my father, to my uncle, to FDR, to Harry Truman, to Thomas Jefferson as the chairman referred to. It is the basis for Democracy.”
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“The First Amendment was not written for easy speech,” he added. “It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for.”
He noted recent emails that show the Biden administration tried to censor his comments about vaccines, just three days into the start of that administration.
“They had to invent a new word called ‘malinformation’ to censor people like me,” he said. “Malinformation is information that is true, but it is inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear.”
“My uncle Edward Kennedy has more legislation with his name on it than any senator in United States history,” he said. “Why is that? Because he was able to reach across the aisle, because he didn’t deal in the insults, because he didn’t try to censor people.”