Caroline Kennedy slams RFK Jr. as ‘predator’ before confirmation hearing
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(WASHINGTON) — In a scathing letter Tuesday, Caroline Kennedy warned senators about her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., calling him a “predator.”
The letter was sent to lawmakers ahead of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearing for the role of secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), which is scheduled for Wednesday.
Caroline Kennedy – a former U.S. ambassador to both Australia and Japan and the last living child of former President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s uncle – called the role “an enormous responsibility, and one that Bobby is unqualified to fill.”
Caroline Kennedy wrote that she feels “an obligation to speak out” now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been nominated for “a position that would put him in charge of the health of the American people.”
“I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together,” she wrote in the letter, in part. “It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because he himself is a predator.”
Caroline Kennedy said she watched family members follow her cousin “down the path of drug addiction,” and shared disturbing details of his alleged behavior with animals.
“His basement, his garage, and his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence,” she wrote.
She also accused Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of being “addicted to attention and power,” and said he “preys on the desperation of parents of sick children – vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs.”
Caroline Kennedy further accused her cousin of “[continuing] to grandstand off my father’s assassination, and that of his own father,” saying former President Kennedy “would be disgusted” by his actions.
“The American health care system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world,” Caroline Kennedy wrote. “Its doctors and nurses, researchers, scientists, and caregivers are the most dedicated people I know. Every day, they give their lives to heal and save others.”
“They deserve better than Bobby Kennedy – and so do the rest of us. I urge the Senate to reject his nomination,” she concluded.
(WASHINGTON) — With online access to pornography and other sexually explicit content easier than ever before, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday will take a fresh look at government efforts to impose new safeguards for children by requiring adult websites to conduct electronic age verification.
The case, brought by an adult entertainment industry trade group and several content creators, challenges a 2023 Texas law that says sites containing more than one-third of “sexual material harmful to minors” must verify that a user is at least 18 years old or face civil penalties up to $10,000 per day.
The law, HB 1181, mandates that adult sites implement a system to check a user’s digital identification or government-issued ID using a “commercially reasonable method.” They are not allowed to retain personal information, but the law offers no other requirements for data security and privacy.
Content platforms like Pornhub, one of the most popular websites in the world, have chosen to stop operating in Texas rather than comply with the law. They argue it violates the First Amendment and unfairly targets the porn industry since search engines and social media apps are exempt.
The case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, pits a growing nationwide effort to strengthen protections for minors online against long-standing constitutional protections for sexual material that have helped bolster the rise of a booming multi-billion dollar business.
“More people watch porn and view porn each year than vote and read the newspaper,” said Lisa Blatt, a veteran Supreme Court litigator with Williams & Connolly LLP. A 2016 study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found that up to 70% of men and 40% of women have consumed pornography within the past year in the U.S.
American teenagers have reported similar levels of exposure to pornography in a number of studies conducted over the past three years. Public health experts say young people who view sexually explicit content are more likely to start having sex earlier, engage in unsafe sex, and have multiple partners.
Texas is among nineteen states that have recently enacted age-verification requirements for adult content online, according to the Age Verification Providers Association.
The state has said that online age verification should be no more controversial or unconstitutional than the common practice of verifying a customer’s age before the purchase of an adult magazine at a newsstand or purchasing liquor at a bar.
Supreme Court precedent has set a high bar for laws that infringe on individual free speech rights even if they are meant to advance another compelling public interest, such as protecting kids.
Twenty years ago in a remarkably similar case — Ashcroft v. ACLU — the court struck down federal legislation that would have required age verification to view sexually explicit material. The decision instead put the onus on parents and technology companies to utilize less burdensome content-filtering software.
Supporters of the Texas law say those tools have proven ineffective and that evolving technology has changed the constitutional calculus for whether asking porn producers to act as gatekeepers violates the First Amendment.
“It’s time to think again about what is a mechanism that can achieve a legitimate objective of states protecting children from what is increasingly violent and misogynistic pornography online,” said Iain Corby, executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association, an international trade group made up of technology companies. “It’s possible to prove your age entirely on your own cell phone, so no personal data need ever leave the palm of your hand.”
An rapidly evolving industry of third-party age verification services and apps, Corby said, has made the process quick, secure, and free — a far cry from more cumbersome options of two decades ago.
“Because no one disputes that Texas can prevent kids from accessing hardcore pornography, this case is about means, not ends,” the state told the Court in its legal briefing. “And the means Texas has chosen is appropriate.”
Civil liberties groups argue that the constitutionality question remains clear cut.
“The government cannot make it illegal to publish certain sexual content online without verifying the age of users first, and yet that’s exactly what states are now doing,” said Vera Eidelman, an ACLU attorney who focuses on free speech litigation.
Eidelman argues that the Texas law robs adults who want to legally view sexually-explicit material the right to anonymity, and potentially puts their private information at risk of abuse.
“It’s really different to show your ID in person than it is to have to offer up personal identifying information online, creating potential targets for data breaches, hackers potentially creating much more of a record of what you are looking at,” Eidelman said.
She also claims that the Texas law could ensnare a much wider range of websites than those selling pornography, such as those hosting sexual health education resources or R-rated content.
“Young people certainly deserve our protection, but whenever the government is passing a law in the name of protecting kids, I think there are serious questions to be asked about whether what it’s really doing is saying the [content] is bad for everyone,” said Eidelman. “That’s exactly what the First Amendment exists to protect against.”
The court is expected to deliver a decision in the case by the end of June.
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump has proposed a plan to eliminate the Department of Education to “send all education work and needs back to the states,” according to his Agenda47 policy platform.
According to education experts, an end to the Department of Education could leave billions of funds, scholarships, grants and more hanging in the balance for the millions of K-12 and college students attending schools in the U.S.
The DOE was established as a Cabinet-level agency in 1979 under then-President Jimmy Carter, but was initially created in the late 1800s to collect data on what is working effectively in education for policymakers and educators.
The education agency facilitated the expansion of federal support for schooling over the years. After World War II, the GI Bill expanded education assistance for war veterans. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, the agency led to the expansion of science, math and foreign language instruction in elementary and secondary schools and supported vocational-technical training.
In the 1960s and 1970s, anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts shaped the Department of Education’s mission to provide equal access to education nationwide. This led to the founding of Title I funding to reduce educational achievement gaps between low-income and rural students and non-low-income schools.
The DOE also holds schools accountable for enforcing non-discrimination laws like Title IX based on gender, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Americans with Disabilities Act based on disability and Title VI based on race.
Federal Student Aid, awarding more than $120 billion a year in grants, work-study funds, and low-interest loans to approximately 13 million students, is also backed by the Department of Education.
The Department also holds schools accountable under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which requires each state to provide data on subject performance, graduation rates, suspensions, absenteeism, teacher qualifications, and more.
The department states on its website that it does not develop school curricula, set requirements for enrollment and graduation, or establish or accredit schools or universities.
However, it has played a major role in school funding for decades, particularly as state investment in K-12 schools worsened amid the 2008 Great Recession.
According to the Education Law Center, U.S. students lost almost $600 billion from states’ disinvestment in their public schools in the decade following the Great Recession.
The complicated nature of a department closure includes administering the billions of DOE funds directly to the individual states, according to higher education expert Clare McCann. McCann said doling out the money is something skilled employees at the DOE would be equipped to do.
“There’s a reason the Department of Education was created and it was to have this kind of in-house expertise and policy background on these [education] issues,” McCann told ABC News, adding, “The civil servants who work at the Department of Education are true experts in the field.”
Education Analyst Neal McCluskey at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that dismantling the department could be as simple as giving states the funding, but allowing them to decide how it’s administered.
“What I’ve seen most often, and I’ve written about myself, is you could, for instance, take all the K-12 money, Title One, IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] etc. — You would, of course, have to change the law, but one of the things you could do is block grant it; You’d say, ‘we’re going to fund these things, but we’re going to give it to the state so they can decide how it’s administered,'” he told ABC News.
Some education experts like Wendy A. Paterson, a professor and dean at Buffalo State University’s School of Education, told ABC News in an interview that she “could not see how serving families and children under the offices of the Department of Education could continue” without a federal department.
Paterson said that if funding itself is changed, it will likely worsen the national teacher shortage and impact the targeted communities the Department of Education specializes in — including low-income, disabled or FAFSA-seeking students.
“There’s an intimate relationship between our schools and the society that we create and that we pass along to our children, and it’s that important,” said Paterson. “So if we don’t have a federal organization that acknowledges the importance of schools and post-secondary education and the right of all children to have access to education, what are we saying about democracy?”
Why does Trump want to get rid of the Department of Education?
In a 2023 statement on his plans for schools, Donald Trump said that “one thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states.”
“We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it,” said Trump.
Trump’s Agenda47 does not state how the dismantling of the department would impact the programs the Department of Education runs.
However, on the campaign trail, in interviews with Elon Musk and on “Fox & Friends,” Trump has repeatedly said he wants to shutter the agency and instead choose one education department official for his Cabinet, aligning with Trump’s goals of dismantling “government bureaucracy” and restructuring the government agencies for more efficiency.
Several prominent conservatives and Republican figures have similarly proposed department closures over the years, including Ronald Reagan, Vivek Ramaswamy, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
McCluskey said in a recent essay that the department is “unconstitutional,” arguing that it exerts too much power over schools above local and state entities.
House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx has also argued that it’s not a constitutional requirement to have such a department: “I can’t find the word education in there [the Constitution] as one of the duties and responsibilities of Congress or the federal government,” Rep. Foxx, R-North Carolina, told ABC News.
Is it possible to eliminate it?
While possible in theory, education policy experts who spoke with ABC News suggest that would be an extremely chaotic – and unrealistic — task on Jan. 20, 2025, Inauguration Day.
The bold initiative won’t happen immediately, but McCluskey told ABC News it could be done through Congress.
“The Department of Education was created through legislation,” McCluskey told ABC News. “Legislation comes through Congress. If you want to take the Department of Education apart, you have to do that through legislation,” McCluskey added.
At this point, without congressional approval, McCluskey said the campaign trail messaging by the president-elect has no standing.
“I think that what is said on the campaigns and what actually is done have to often be two different things because, in campaigns, politicians say a lot of things that make it seem like it’s easy to do what they want to do,” McCluskey said.
“No president can just fire everybody in the Department of Education and have one person administer those programs,” he added.
Trump’s education policy
Trump, however, does list several federal policies he hopes to implement in schools nationwide. This includes instructing a future education department to cease programs that he claims “promote the concept of sex and gender transition, at any age” as well as punish teachers or schools who do so.
He hopes to create a credentialing body to certify teachers “who embrace patriotic values and support the American way of life,” though he does not further elaborate on what that consists of.
He also would prevent Title IX from allowing transgender women to compete in sports. He said he will create funding preferences and favorable treatment for states and school districts that abolish teacher tenure and adopt merit pay for educators for grades K-12 and allow parents to vote for principals.
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — During an all-staff call earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign leadership urged staffers not to speak with reporters and addressed concerns about the future after her loss to Donald Trump in the election, two people on the call told ABC News.
Campaign Chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks implored staffers not to speak with reporters, with Fulks saying they still needed staffers “staying in this fight.”
One source noted that the call gave the same “gaslighty” feeling they received after President Joe Biden left the race in July. In an all-staff call following Biden’s departure from the race, staffers were caught off guard and were only given a one-minute heads up that he was exiting the race before he made it public.
ABC News has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on the matter.
During the call, O’Malley Dillon told staffers that they ran a “very close” race. She said that state teams knocked on more than 50 million doors in the final days before Election Day and their field operation helped the Senate races in those states. O’Malley Dillon teared up toward the end of the call, a source confirmed.
Harris spoke on that call, noting that this moment “sucks,” a source told ABC News.
“We all just speak truth, why don’t we, right? There’s also so much good that has come of this campaign,” Harris said, according to the source.
Harris had a hopeful tone in her message to supporters at Howard on Wednesday, too, saying “sometimes the fight takes a while. … The important thing is don’t ever give up.”
During the call, leadership spoke about the next general steps for staffers and connecting with people for their next jobs.
Last month on the show, when asked what she would have done differently than Biden over the last four years, Harris said, “there is not a thing that comes to mind,” before citing, much later in the interview, her pledge to put a Republican in her Cabinet.
