The senator supports Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr., who holds extreme pro-choice views, to be HHS secretary, a critical role in federal abortion policy.

Five years ago, freshly arrived in the Senate, Josh Hawley used the nomination of Neomi Rao to the D.C. Circuit to send a message to the Trump White House: he was going to use the advice and consent role of the Senate to ensure that he was “only going to support nominees who have a strong record on life,” including “respect for what the Supreme Court itself has called the interests of the unborn child.” At the time, while raising some questions about Hawley’s approach, Ramesh defended Hawley’s willingness to take such a public stance on the ground that “fairness to [Rao], while important, is less important than moving the courts in the right direction.” But even some judicial conservatives thought that Hawley was being too purist on the matter. The Judicial Crisis Network “has taken to comparing Hawley to former Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill” and planned “to spend $500,000 on ads in Missouri in a widespread effort to show Hawley ‘that support for conservative judicial nominees is not negotiable.’” Senator John Kennedy complained that Hawley had been subjected to “bullying” for being so insistent. Eventually, Hawley fell into line, as did Joni Ernst, who had raised questions about Rao’s approach to sexual assaults. But he was defiant about the importance of the question: “I am committed to vetting every nominee that comes before this committee. There are some inside this building and outside of it that would prefer I would do as instructed and go along to get along. . . . That is not going to happen.” Lindsey Graham said that “what Senator Hawley tried to do is the solution, not the problem.” Hawley told a talk-radio show back home in Missouri, “I want to make sure that Neomi Rao is pro-life — it’s as simple as that.”

Is it still as simple as that?

Perhaps no cabinet position — maybe not even the attorney general — has as much direct influence over federal abortion policy as the secretary of health and human services. As Ramesh wrote in the Washington Post earlier this week: “HHS is the largest department in the federal government, and many issues related to the right to life run through it — including conscience protections for medical workers who oppose abortion, research on human embryos and fetuses, and federal health-care programs that include restrictions on funding abortion that Democrats have been trying to eliminate.” Yet Donald Trump’s HHS nominee is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:

During Kennedy’s presidential campaign, he took an extreme pro-choice position on abortion but sometimes wobbled. In August 2023, he said he would sign a federal abortion ban at some point after 12 weeks of pregnancy, but then he walked this back hours later, releasing a statement that it is “always a woman’s right to choose.” In May this year, when asked whether abortion should be allowed to end a pregnancy “even if it’s full-term,” the candidate responded yes. His campaign then affirmed his opposition to restrictions on late-term abortions. As of today, Kennedy continues to dodge questions on at what point late in pregnancy he believes abortions should be banned and says he supports “a woman’s right to choose.”

What was Hawley’s reaction when the nomination was announced? A celebratory tweet of “Bad day for Big Pharma! @RobertKennedyJr.” He told Axios, “My working assumption is that I’ll support all the president’s nominees.” Pressed on RFK’s very much not pro-life record, he told CNN: “Being a cabinet secretary is not an exercise in individuality, you know? These people serve the principal, the principal is the president. So, I assume that he will support the president’s policies, whatever his personal position is. You don’t get hired because of your personal positions. I don’t want to presume I know the answers, but I’d be really surprised if he didn’t say ‘I’ll support the president’s policies on this and faithfully execute those.’” He told The Dispatch, “I assume that RFK at HHS will take the same positions that the president took in his first administration in terms of supporting life in the various relevant regulatory ways.” This despite Trump’s saying on the campaign trail, “I’m going to let him go wild on health.” It also ignores the reality that the landscape has changed since Trump’s first term: the Dobbs decision has expanded the scope of what the political branches may do to restrict abortion, and the Biden administration responded to Dobbs by making a variety of policies that promoted and protected abortion, in some cases with the explicit purpose of overriding or undermining pro-life state laws. There will be many new and fresh decisions to make.

This isn’t a matter of Hawley’s approach to Trump’s appointees being different from how he reacted to those of Joe Biden, or of another Republican. Rao was a Trump appointee. It’s true that senators traditionally and properly give more deference to executive-branch than judicial nominees because the president is entitled to his team and can fire them, whereas judges are independent and serve for life. But the change in tone is unmistakable: Hawley loudly asserted the Senate’s independent role five years ago in standing specifically for life based on mere rumors of Rao’s impurity on abortion, yet now when a long-time avowedly pro-choice nominee who campaigned on the issue just this year has been tapped to head the agency that oversees much of the federal government’s abortion policy, he seems just to meekly accept that nothing can or should be done by the Senate to challenge that nominee on the question.

Since Dobbs, more than a few Republicans have gone wobbly on abortion, concluding that standing for life is a political liability. Is Josh Hawley now one of those?