This is an opinion column.

Alabama could lose millions from Trump’s cuts at the National Institutes for Health, but Sen. Katie Britt wants you to know it will all be OK. She’s going to have a talk with Trump’s new Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr., to straighten things out.

You know, that guy who dumps dead bears in parks and doesn’t believe in vaccines. She wants us to believe she’s going to talk sense into him.

In December, Britt had only glowing things to say about RFK Jr. after what she described as an extensive conversation. But that now seems to have been little more than a photo op for her Instagram feed.

“There is no doubt that Americans are facing a health crisis – both mental and physical,” she said then. “I was happy to meet with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who will work tirelessly to Make America Healthy Again. He has my support.”

And with a shallow second on social media, her moment for Advise and Consent passed.

But now that this man is in charge, she’s going to have a talk? Hope she does a better job than she did in last year’s State of the Union rebuttal.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is threatening a showdown with the federal courts over the same issues. (In other states, not Alabama, because our state attorney general doesn’t stand up for the state, either.) If they don’t care what federal judges say, are we to believe they’ll listen to her? Or to anyone?

The trouble here is that Britt had her time to talk, as did her Senate colleague, Tommy Tuberville. They had more than that. They had a vote — several of them — to confirm or deny the president’s appointments to lead federal agencies.

Instead, they used their time at the mics to lick boot.

As United States senators, they had a constitutional duty to advise and consent. Or in plain language, to do their jobs.

But they didn’t.

Instead, they turned the U.S. Senate into a political concierge service for the president, and in Tuberville’s case, threatened anyone who questioned Trump’s appointments.

“If you want to get in the way, fine, but we’re gonna try to get you out of the Senate, too, if you try to do that,” Tuberville said on Fox Business last November.

When asked whether he would evaluate the appointees’ qualifications for these jobs, Tuberville forgot to read the Constitution again.

“It’s not for us to determine that,” he said then.

More recently, when a Washington Post reporter asked him whether Trump’s appointees would fulfill their constitutional oaths of office if they conflicted with Trump, Tuberville played dumb — not that hard, I know.

“I don’t know anything about that, about a constitutional oath of office,” Tuberville said before lapsing into Footballese. “It’s important that you’re a team player, but also you got to go by your own thoughts and beliefs.”

If you’re re-reading “thoughts and beliefs” and wondering what that means, I might be able to help. Two weeks ago, Tuberville sat on the Senate committee tasked with reviewing RFK Jr.’s qualifications for office. But rather than ask him about all the strange things he’s said over the years, Tuberville was effusive.

“My two boys, 28 and 30, a year or so ago — they were going to vote for you for president of the United States. You know why?” Tuberville asked. “Because you’re trying to save their group of people from the chemicals and the things we have in our food.”

This would have been the perfect moment for Tuberville to ask what might lay in store for Alabama health science researchers.

Instead, Tuberville found it the perfect moment to share his thoughts about ADHD medications (“When you and I were growing up, our parents didn’t use a drug. They used a belt and whipped our butt and told us to sit down.”), his deep suspicions of food colorings and vaccines.

“I had my first granddaughter here a couple of weeks,” he said. “And my son and his wife have done their research about vaccines and she’s not going to be a pin cushion.”

When a Senator from Alabama doesn’t believe in science, why should we expect him to support Alabama scientists?

But what the Tuberville family thinks about food coloring or polio is beside the point. Our Senators had a job to do. They failed to do it — not just with Junior, but all of Trump’s appointments. Advise and consent doesn’t work after the fact.

And now Alabama is seeing the downstream effects of that failure.

There is a lot of glee out there for the Leopard Ate My Face-ness of this moment, but people in Alabama depend on its healthcare institutions. There are generations not yet born who will need the medicines, technology and procedures being developed at its universities. There are hardworking scientists, doctors and researchers who could lose their jobs because they chose to take jobs in Alabama, and not one of the other states pushing back on this insanity.

It’s a tragedy for them.

And for the rest of us, a lesson.

Kyle Whitmire is the Washington watchdog columnist for AL.com and winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. You can follow him on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter (he doesn’t call it by that other name), Threads and Bluesky.

You can also subscribe to his weekly newsletter Alabamafication here.