Politics & Power Quote by Tammy Baldwin

Tammy Baldwin frames science as an inherited moral code: clean, communal, and guarded from the grubby hands of ideology. The choice of "my grandfather's lab" is doing heavy lifting. It’s an origin story that borrows the credibility of a private, almost sacred space where truth is earned through method, not messaging. By invoking peer review in plain terms - "reviewed and commented on its merits" - she reminds a general audience that science already has a built-in accountability system, one that doesn’t require partisan referees.

The subtext is a rebuke, but a strategically softened one. Baldwin doesn’t name climate denial, pandemic-era misinformation, or the culture-war battles over public health. She doesn’t have to. "Politics... had no place" implies that politics is currently very much in the room, leaning over the microscope. It’s a neat inversion: the line isn’t an attack on political opponents so much as an attempt to shame the current moment by holding it up against an older standard of professionalism.

Context matters because Baldwin is a politician praising a politics-free zone. That tension is the point. The quote positions her not as someone trying to "control the science", but as a guardian of the boundary between expertise and power. It’s also an appeal to middle-American pragmatism: let the people trained to test hypotheses do their job, and let elected officials stop auditioning as lab managers. In an era where "trust the science" can sound like a slogan, she tries to make trust feel like family practice.