It hasn’t been my intention to run a series of columns chronicling the Democrats’ long sojourn into the political wilderness, but let’s face it — these things are writing themselves.
Take, for example, the eight painful minutes that ensued when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Pfizer), the self-styled Advocate For The People who rose to prominence as a fake Native American academic and who again and again is exposed as an utter fraud in politics, was given the microphone to examine Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Trump administration’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
If you haven’t seen this, you owe it to yourself to plow through the whole thing — if for no other reason than that you’ll get an opportunity to see just what kind of individual they’ll let into the Senate these days:
But in case you just can’t endure all of that, here’s an AI-aided silent video synopsis that more or less captures the tone of the questions…
I’ll let Kling AI do a video caption of it… pic.twitter.com/urD3PM70fe
— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) January 29, 2025
Liz Warren turns out to have taken a very large amount of money from the pharmaceutical industry. Apparently more than $5 million’s worth.
Speaking of shills, Senator Warren raked in over $5.2 million from Big Pharma and the medical industrial complex. pic.twitter.com/5ipprNWuco
— Rep. Nancy Mace (@RepNancyMace) January 29, 2025
So it isn’t really all that surprising that Warren, who is supposedly reasonably similar to Kennedy in many aspects of political ideology, would have had at him hammer and tong on an issue that came off as utterly unreasonable.
She’s demanding that he take no payment for services rendered as an attorney on lawsuits against the pharmaceutical industry, past and future. Kennedy already said that while he’s HHS secretary he won’t be filing lawsuits against Big Pharma in his capacity as a trial lawyer, and he’s complied with all ethical mandates and disclosures required of someone in his position as the nominee for HHS secretary. That isn’t what Warren is demanding. Instead, she’s complaining that he won’t go further and essentially take an oath of poverty.
That isn’t a standard anybody should want for cabinet appointees.
There is a fine line out there, to be sure. You don’t want a revolving door between government officials and private-sector companies rent-seeking or pursuing regulatory capture.
The funny thing here is that Kennedy is the exact opposite of that. Early in Warren’s questioning, he quipped that it would be highly unlikely that anyone in the pharmaceutical industry would be stroking a check his way any time soon.
What blasted her into moonbat-land was the idea that Kennedy might get paid for work done attempting to hold that industry accountable for harm it’s done.
Warren probably should have given this some thought before Wednesday, because she’s now being eviscerated for all that campaign sileage Pharma has shoveled her way. And she should be, because her reservoir of credibility as a Bringer of Accountability is as empty as the one outside Los Angeles when those fires came.
There is a larger point here, and it’s something I’ve touched on a time or two before.
And it’s this: there are two ways to regulate economic activity, which are represented in this rather instructive, if grotesque, spectacle.
One way to do it is to deploy armies of government “experts” trained at expensive institutions of higher education to write reams of rules and regulations that must be complied with no matter their relationship to reality by those who would engage in the activity in question. The quality of their work product would then be determined by a couple of factors: first, whether the regulators actually know anything about what they’re regulating, and second, whether the regulators are acting of their own volition or are instead acting as the puppets of the richest and most influential incumbents in the industry in question.
Our experiences with this kind of regulation, which Liz Warren and the rest of the Hard Left believe is the bees’ knees, have been spotty at best.
The other way to regulate economic behavior is within the court system. Namely, that trial lawyers like RFK Jr. take the cases of those harmed by the conduct of others to court and, if judges and juries evaluate those cases as having merit, earn compensation for the harm. And perhaps sometimes punitive damages in especially egregious cases. The effect of those suits, when managed well, is to spur better economic behavior from those who might otherwise neglectfully (or worse) cause harm while trying to make a buck. The insurance industry shouldering the burden of those damages to an extent especially affects this, as insurers all have risk management divisions that are full of experts recommending what risks should be priced at what rates.
The RFK trial lawyer model is better in the long run. It’s a tool of the market to create a safer society in a way that doesn’t discourage innovation and also doesn’t crush smaller or newer economic actors thanks to regulatory capture.
And that model is going to gain in influence, particularly on the right but not just on the right, thanks to the corruption and bad faith of Liz Warren’s regulatory friends.
One of the items to look for as our ongoing American political realignment continues is trial lawyers abandoning Democrats and joining the MAGA coalition. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement is part of this, and it’s one reason why the success of his nomination isn’t really all that important in the grand scheme of things. If it isn’t Kennedy, it’ll be someone else, but either way, MAHA is a key campaign promise of Donald Trump’s, and Kennedy’s successor as HHS nominee will be on board with it as well, should one be needed. Given that it’s the federal regulatory state that has created our current reality of bad diet, overmedication, and poor health, deregulation by bureaucrats and a reemphasis on using the courts to balance economic activity and harm would seem to make sense in the promotion of an American revival.
So given that apparent shift in direction, which transcends the identity of the HHS nominee, what’s the point of screeching at Kennedy like Warren did? Is this the plaintive wail of the bureaucratic “expert” class through their anointed savior from Harvard by way of the teepee?
Or is it Pharma’s paid shill desperately trying to throw obstacles in the way of someone who would break down the current regime of corruption, regulatory capture, graft, and lousy results?
You can decide this for yourself. I think you probably already know where your author comes down on this question.
READ MORE:
Democrats Have No Roadmap for Their Journey Through the Wilderness … and James Carville Knows It