Michael Bennet won a reputation late last month as one of sharpest questioners to confront Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a tense Senate hearing to consider the former independent presidential candidate’s fitness to serve as Donald Trump’s health secretary, but the Colorado Democrat wasn’t alone in pressing Kennedy over the nominee’s past statements about vaccination and infectious diseases.

Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy, one of four physicians in the Senate, also grilled Kennedy on his professed conversion — just in time for his confirmation hearings — from being one of the nation’s leading critics of vaccine safety to someone pledging to trust the science.

By the time the full Senate voted on Kennedy’s nomination on Feb. 13, however, Cassidy had already vote twice in committees to wave the nominee ahead, and only one Republican — Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, who contracted polio as a child — joined every Democrat voting no on the floor. In a chamber controlled 53-47 by Republicans, that meant that Kennedy, like every other Trump cabinet pick so far, is joining the new administration.

Speaking to reporters shortly after Kennedy was confirmed, Bennet said he was disappointed that only one Republican had voted against turning over the keys to the nation’s $1.7 trillion Department of Health and Human Services to one of the country’s most high-profile vaccine skeptics.

“I think that out of 330 million Americans, we probably could find somebody to be one of the most important health officers in the nation, someone who’s not peddling conspiracy theories about vaccination and the relationship of vaccines to autism,” Bennet said, adding, “We fought a hard fight to keep him from being confirmed, but in the end we were not successful.”

Earlier the same day, Bennet was one of 19 Democrat who voted to confirm Texas Republican Brooke Rollins as secretary of agriculture in a vote the lawmaker said demonstrated his decision not to oppose Trump at every turn.

Noting that Rollins passed unanimously out of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, where he is the second-most senior Democrat, Bennet said, “I believe it’s very important for Colorado’s farmers and ranchers for me to have a constructive relationship with the ag secretary, just as I think it’s very important to have a constructive relationship with the veterans secretary, for Colorado’s veterans. That’s why I haven’t taken a blanket approach.”

Added Bennet: “I have some doubt in my mind whether a blanket approach — that’s also guaranteed to be a losing approach — is the smart thing to do, strategically, over the long term.”

Unlike nearly a dozen of his Democratic colleagues who have opposed nearly all of Trump’s cabinet picks, Bennet has voted to approve almost as many Trump nominees as he’s voted against, consenting to seven of the 16 nominees considered by the full Senate through Feb. 13. His fellow Coloradan, Democrat John Hickenlooper, has voted for one more Trump nominee than Bennett, with the two splitting on hedge fund manager Scott Bessant to be the next treasury secretary.

As of Feb. 13, just three Republican senators had cast any votes against confirming Trump cabinet nominees, with Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski only breaking rank once, when they joined with McConnell to vote against former Fox News host and veterans’ advocate Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense.

“I think the Democratic Party is in a profoundly problematic position that’s not Donald Trump’s creating,” he said. “We have to figure out how to get to a place where we are providing a vision for the country that is compelling, so that we can overcome Trumpism in the long run. And it’s harder to do that as people are chasing every single social media thread and every single cable media host every single day.”

Bennet, who was elected to a third full term in 2022, has hammered the same point since soon after joining the Senate in early 2009.

“That does not mean — I want to be very clear — that I’m ever putting up the white flag of surrender,” he added. “It means I think it’s very important to us that we select our battles in ways that make clear to the American people where Donald Trump is going horribly wrong in their interests, and where we can battle back.”

In the little over three weeks since Trump’s inauguration, that’s meant supporting lawsuits challenging Trump’s deluge of executive orders and signing numerous letters demanding answers from the administration on a range of its actions, from shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development to maintaining a freeze on more than $570 million in federal funds bound for Colorado, despite court rulings ordering the White House to free up spending already approved by Congress.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” Bennet said, adding that the Trump administration has been “taking it onto themselves decisions that are constitutionally made by Congress.”

Bennet, the author of a 2019 book about the Senate’s dysfunction, said he hopes GOP lawmakers will step up to protect the constitutional order of checks and balances.

“No president has ever been king in this country, going back to the very beginning,” he said. “And the reason for that is we have almost always acted consistent with the checks and balances that the founders put forward for us. I don’t think we can take that for granted today, but we have to fight to make sure we enforce those and work with our Republican colleagues to make sure we are doing that — even when it’s hard or politically difficult for them.”

Bennet didn’t sound confident that his Republican colleagues will defend their role.

“That is my concern, is that the president and his crew will intimidate people in a way that will make them less able — or less willing — to protect these checks and balances, and we can’t let that happen, because once things start to spiral, they start to spiral,” he said.

Bennet said Democratic senators are paying close attention to how the administration is responding to adverse judicial rulings.

“It’s very troubling to see the president go after these judges, but that’s nothing new, that’s what he did the last time he was president,” Bennet said. “Those checks and balances — this is another place where democracy itself could be fraying in ways that are important.”

As for the White House simply defying court orders, as Vice President JD Vance recently mused the Trump administration could do, Bennet said that it’s a danger.

“I think that we’re all cognizant of that possibility, and we’re going to have to see what happens,” Bennet said, adding that he is encouraged that judicial rulings have so far “been undisturbed” by the president. “Our government can’t work unless there’s a functional judiciary as part of it.”

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