On Wednesday, the Senate confirmed Richard Levine (AKA Rachel Levine) as assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services.  Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski joined with the Democrats to confirm him in that position even though their votes were not needed: V.P. Harris could have broken the tie.  These women's voluntary defection highlights the Republican Party's most serious problem: it lacks cohesion.

Regarding Levine, he's a pediatrician who announced a few years ago that he was, in fact, a woman named Rachel.  I am genuinely sorry that he suffers from body dysmorphia in a form that is right up there with anorexia when it comes to delusional thinking.  Nevertheless, let's be honest: his gender confusion is the only qualification he has for the position to which he's been appointed.

Were he just plain old Richard, it is unlikely that anyone would pay attention to this shlemiel, with his offensive, stereotyped cultural appropriation of femininity.  Now, though, Levine ticks a diversity box on the Democrat laundry list of virtues, and he holds one of the highest medical offices in the land — and this despite a less than stellar performance in Pennsylvania during 2020's COVID crisis.

But what does this have to do with Senators Collins and Murkowski?  They voted to confirm him, that's what.

Levine's competence is questionable.  Pennsylvania is one of the four states that saw so many old people die from COVID that it became the subject of a Department of Justice investigation.  In addition, even as his state was shipping COVID-infected people into nursing homes, turning them into charnel houses, Levine spirited his mother out of her nursing home–like facility and off to safety.

What makes Levine even more unqualified to serve is that he thinks it's appropriate to give life-altering hormones to children who express gender confusion:

In 2017, Levine recommended cross-sex hormones for children in their mid-teens. According to a video of his speech obtained by The National Pulse, Levine warned about the dangers of going through "the wrong puberty" and encouraged hormones to prevent the natural process of adolescent development.

"So what if you're going through the wrong puberty? What if you're a transgender young woman [sic — a male] — meaning male to female — and now your voice is dropping, you're getting bigger, you're getting hair everyone [sic], and you're growing those [testicles]. And what if you're a transgender young man [sic — meaning a young woman], and now you have breast development you're experiencing, it's terrifying," Levine argued.

He lamented that "basically, there was no treatment for individuals that were under 18" under earlier guidelines. By 2017, however, new pro-transgender guidelines approved the use of experimental drugs that supposedly "block" the onset of puberty and cross-sex hormones.

Young people are notoriously malleable when it comes to gender identity.  Giving them hormones can chemically castrate or sterilize them, as well as setting them up for unnecessary cancer and heart disease risks.  Studies show that providing surgery and sex hormones does not make these poor souls any happier.  One day, perhaps, when this madness ends, the medical community might opt for counseling and hormones aligned with a child's sex.

It's Levine's willingness to destroy healthy young bodies that makes him unsuited for such a powerful political office.  And yet Murkowski and Collins went along with him.

Here's the unfortunate political reality: Democrats can almost invariably find a few Republicans to go along with them.  The nature of Democrats — i.e., statists or leftists — is that they are lemmings.  They willingly follow wherever their leaders go.

And the nature of Republicans is that they are independent, liberty-oriented people.  Hard though it is to admit, sleazy RINOs like Ben Sasse and Mitt Romney are also showing independence, even if their independence reveals itself as hating Trump and craving Pelosi's approval.

In 1998, when Bill Clinton was being impeached for lying under oath about his sexual peccadilloes, activists created MoveOn.org, which is a powerhouse, raising funds and mobilizing people to support Democrat causes.  The Democrat party embraced MoveOn.  BLM now occupies the same role.

Meanwhile, when fed up Americans formed the Tea Party, their biggest opposition came from the Republican establishment.  This was the same establishment that birthed those NeverTrumps who were so offended by Trump's abrasive personality that they campaigned for Hillary and Biden.  Democrats don't do that.

During the Bush and the Trump years, Republicans sometimes controlled both the White House and Congress — yet they still couldn't accomplish diddlysquat.  If the 75–80 million people who voted for Donald Trump want to see a change in 2022 and 2024, they need to start primarying Establishment Republicans immediately.  Otherwise, it's going to be Romneys and Murkowskis all the way down, and endless political losses to go with it.

Note: I deliberately "deadname" Levine as a reminder that he's not a cool "transgender" woman but is, instead, an uninspiring political hack, with a bad COVID reputation, who believes it's okay to mutilate children, and who has gotten as far as he has only because he ticks off the novelty-factor box.

Image: Richard Levine.  YouTube screen grab.