By The Democrats love nothing more than impeachment, and while they can’t currently get the votes to go after the president, the impeachment machine is grinding back to life. This time liberals are aiming for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Rep. Haley Stevens, a Democrat from Michigan, now running for Senate and eager to make her mark in a volatile election year, has introduced articles of impeachment accusing Kennedy of betraying scientific standards and sowing disorder inside the federal health apparatus. Her announcement landed with unmistakable theatrical flair: “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.”
Stevens is currently the “moderate” choice for Democrats in the close primary for Senate in the Great Lakes State.
For the congresswoman, the gambit reflects a familiar midterm ritual: elevate the temperature, pick a high-profile target, and frame disagreement as an existential threat. Kennedy, for his part, has spent his tenure challenging nutritional guidelines, rethinking regulatory routines, and unsettling a bureaucracy that largely operated on autopilot during the pre-2025 years. Those debates — substantive, long overdue, and fiercely contested — have now been recast as grounds for removal from office.
The irony, of course, is that many of the same voices now insisting Kennedy has forsaken “science” were uncompromising enforcers of scientific orthodoxy during the pandemic, explains Jonathan Turley. Dissent was not merely frowned upon; it was professionally dangerous. Researchers who questioned school closures, doubted mask efficacy, or challenged the six-foot distancing rule were dismissed as cranks and, in some cases, sanctioned or silenced outright. Those years left a deep imprint on the government’s scientific culture — one Kennedy and his allies argue must be fundamentally changed.
Central to that effort is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the once-blacklisted co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration who now serves as the 18th director of the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya’s opposition to sweeping lockdowns and mass school closures earned him years of vilification before federal agencies and academic bodies quietly began acknowledging that some of those critiques were well-founded. His recent “Intellectual Freedom” award from the American Academy of Sciences and Letters underscores just how dramatically the narrative has shifted since 2020.
The reassessments continue to pile up. Positions once derided as dangerous — natural immunity, the limited effectiveness of surgical masks, the downsides of prolonged school shutdowns — are now part of mainstream policy discussions. Even the origins of the virus, long treated as a taboo subject, have moved firmly into the realm of legitimate inquiry. Federal agencies now lean toward the lab-leak hypothesis as the most plausible explanation. And in a moment that crystallized the era’s arbitrariness, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently testified that the six-foot distancing rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.”
In this light, Kennedy’s defenders argue that the true abandonment of science occurred years earlier. That’s when dissenting researchers were silenced and public health policy hardened into dogma. They contend that Stevens’ impeachment push is less about misconduct than about punishing a political apostate: a scion of a Democratic dynasty who has broken with his party’s pandemic-era certainties and refused to recite its catechisms.
Democrats plainly dislike Kennedy’s agenda at HHS. Fine, his supporters say — fight him in committee, legislate against his initiatives, or use the appropriations process to restrain the department. What impeachment cannot do, they argue, is substitute for a confirmation battle the party lost.
Yet Stevens’ move signals something broader. With the midterms approaching, impeachment is again becoming a campaign accessory — a blunt instrument repurposed for partisan theater rather than constitutional necessity. At this point, without anything else to say about how they’ve ruined the healthcare system with big government programs like Obamacare, theater is all they have left, even as voters show little appetite for reliving them.
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