Rebecca Bennett’s husband is a Senior Manager in Trump’s Energy Department

Alex Hydrean, the husband of New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District Democratic frontrunner Rebecca Bennett, draws a six-figure salary from Republican President Donald Trump’s Department of Energy.

A longtime Texas Republican who changed her party in 2016, Bennett owns stock in the world’s largest fossil fuel polluters and has invested up to $120,000 in contractors for a Gestapo-like immigration enforcement agency.

Until 2016, she voted as a Republican.

The Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District presents voters with a fundamental question: why replace a Republican with a candidate who opposes Medicare for All, whose husband works in the Trump administration, and whose stances on abortion, gun control, and the looming Social Security crisis are either unknown or indistinguishable from the GOP incumbent she wants to unseat?

The point is not academic.

Tom Kean Jr., the Republican incumbent, has perfected the art of saying one thing to moderate voters in public while maintaining a record that pleases his party’s base.

On abortion, Kean has told New Jersey audiences he is “pro-choice” and would oppose a national ban. But as a state senator, he voted repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood and opposed the 2022 New Jersey law that codified abortion rights.

He has an “A” rating from the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and during his 2022 congressional campaign, Rep. Tom Kean Jr. utilized a hard-to-find webpage to court conservative voters. Titled Tom Kean Jr.: The Conservative Leader, the page declared him a “fierce defender of the sanctity of life” who promised to fight “every step of the way to protect the unborn from egregious abortion laws”.

On guns, Kean has earned an “A+” rating from the NRA, which celebrates him as a loyal ally of the gun lobby. NJTODAY.NEWS could not confirm that Bennett and her husband are members of the National Rifle Association, but each came from conservative Christian families in areas where people are comfortable with firearms.

On Social Security, Kean voted for the so-called “Big, Ugly Law” that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent himself admitted was a “backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”

The trust fund for Social Security’s retirement benefits is now only six years from insolvency. A 24% across-the-board cut in benefits will be triggered automatically when reserves are depleted, which the Congressional Budget Office expects in 2032.

Bennett has not said if she will respond to that crisis by requiring tax increases, benefit cuts, or an increase in the retirement age, although Kean has made his allegiance clear: he sides with those who want to dismantle the program.

One of four contenders in the Democratic Party’s June 2 primary who hope to replace Kean, Bennett says she wants to fight for working families and has not disclosed whether she supports Trump’s proposed $1½ trillion military budget.

She flew Navy helicopters for 15 years, much of it fighting in America’s oil wars.

Her husband, Alex Hydrean, draws a six-figure salary from the Trump administration’s Department of Energy as a Senior Manager in the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains.

His stated goal, in his own words, is to “unleash a new generation of commercial nuclear power in the United States despite critical dangers associated with the deadly technology.”

Hydrean said the “American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration” and that the department will work “diligently and creatively to enable the rapid deployment and export of next-generation nuclear technology.”

Hydrean is also a retired nuclear submarine officer who served on the USS San Francisco and led nuclear arms control inspections in the United States and Russia. He now serves as a commander in the Navy Reserves.

He is, by any measure, a highly placed national security hawk working for an administration that Bennett claims to oppose.

One of Bennett’s primary opponents, Dr. Tina Shah, an ICU physician endorsed by the American Medical Association, said her refusal to fully comment on policy issues shows her ties to a broken system.

Critics note that Shah’s backers opposed Medicare in the 1960s and object to the proposed government universal health insurance plan.

The AMA fiercely opposed the original Medicare proposal, which was ultimately signed into law in 1965. The group also reaffirmed its official opposition to expanding Medicare into a universal, single-payer program.

“When you fight for incremental change while a system is actively killing people, you are not fighting for change,” said a critic of Shah. “You are making peace with the status quo.”

Bennett, meanwhile, owns stock in ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Phillips 66, some of the world’s largest polluters.

She has invested up to $120,000 in contractors for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that Democrats have compared to the Gestapo, and she was the only candidate in her primary race who refused to commit to abolishing it.

She was a registered Republican as recently as 2016, when she lived in Maryland. She voted against Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. She voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain, the latter of whom she has publicly identified as her role model.

John McCain championed free trade, military adventurism, and deregulation while opposing a federal minimum wage and voting multiple times against raising it. Bennett opposes Medicare for All; her campaign website calls for a “public option” and expanding the Affordable Care Act, not the universal, single-payer system that much of the Democratic base has rallied behind.

Her campaign has been aided by donations from employees of Palantir, the technology company that holds hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, Brian Varela, the only Democratic primary contender who explicitly supports Medicare for All, the proposed universal health insurance program, is believed to be in a tight competition with Bennett in what appears to have boiled down to a two-candidate race.

Shah, and another former Biden administration aide, Michael Roth, have never gotten off the ground, according to polling in the district, which has the nation’s most vulnerable Republican incumbent.

The status quo, in this case, is a Republican incumbent who hides his anti-abortion record behind a public facade of moderation, who has made common cause with the gun lobby, and who has voted to cut the very programs that millions of New Jersey seniors depend on.

One Democrat who wants to replace him has aligned herself with fossil fuel giants, Trump administration officials, and a worldview shaped by John McCain, the very model of conservative Republicanism that Democrats have spent the past decade trying to repudiate.

For voters who have spent years watching Kean hide his true positions, the promise of a Democratic chameleon like John Fetterman or Joe Manchin who does the same should offer little comfort.

A candidate who cannot be trusted to take a clear stand on abortion, to protect the Second Amendment with common-sense safeguards, to defend Social Security from privatization, or to support universal healthcare is not a solution to Kean. It is merely a variation on the same unreliable theme.

The truth is not hard to find.

It is sitting in the Department of Energy. It is sitting in her stock portfolio. It is sitting in her refusal to answer basic questions about whether she stands with her party or with the administration her husband serves.

New Jersey’s 7th District deserves better than a candidate who talks like a progressive and lives like a Republican, but in a district that Democrats must win to take back the House, that is a gamble party insiders may not survive winning.