By and large, Tuesday’s CBS News debate between the two VP candidates, U.S. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, was collegial, friendly, nothing near cringeworthy.
It’s funny to me that I’m seeing Democrats upset that Walz didn’t go for the jugular, when in actuality, he was the one with the game-winning score in the final couple of minutes, cornering Vance on the who won the 2020 election issue.
You could tell there that Vance, who is no dummy, wanted to be able to concede, of course Joe Biden won, it wasn’t even close, but he also doesn’t want his motorcade to end up in a fiery interstate accident on the way to a donut shop in Manheim Township, Pa., if you know what I’m getting at there.
There was also the moment where Vance complained about being fact-checked by one of the CBS News moderators, Margaret Brennan, when he tried to spin his favorite lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
That one was self-inflicted.
What else do we have from a fact-check perspective?
VANCE: “I never supported a national ban (on abortion).”
Vance talked about a “minimum national standard” in his Senate campaign in 2022 that would be, in effect, a national abortion ban.
Here’s what he said:
“I’m sympathetic to the view that like, OK, look here, here’s a situation. Let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion, in 2022 or, let’s say, 2024. And then, you know, every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity, uh, that’s kind of creepy.”
“And, and it’s like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually. So, you know, how hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion in California, and the Soroses of the world respect it.”
WALZ: “Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies.”
Not Project 2025, specifically.
Donald Trump was asked in an April 12 Time magazine interview whether states should monitor women’s pregnancies to determine if they are in compliance with abortion laws.
Trump’s answer: states “might do that,” but as he does on abortion, he deflected by saying it was up to individual states.
Here’s what Project 2025 says about gathering data on pregnancies:
“HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.”
If that sounds like a “register of pregnancies” to you, it does to me, too, so, we’re on the same page.
VANCE: “Kamala Harris let fentanyl into our communities at record levels.”
No.
Close to 90 percent of illicit fentanyl is seized at official border crossings.
The implication from Vance, repeated several times in the debate, that the fentanyl is coming from immigrants who are entering the country illegally is also false.
The data tells us that more than half of the fentanyl being smuggled at the border comes from U.S. citizens, and that virtually none is from migrants seeking asylum.
VANCE: “Thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel.”
Here we go again.
The available evidence shows us that the flow of illegal guns in the opposite direction, from the U.S. to Mexico, not from Mexico to the U.S.
The Mexican government found in a recent study that between 70 and 90 percent of the firearms in that country originated from and passed through the U.S.
The ATF and Government Accountability Office confirmed this in a study, closer to the lower end of the scale.
Mexico might indeed want us to build a wall and agree to pay us for it, to keep our guns out of the hands of its cartels down there.
VANCE: “I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers, a lot of people will go home if they can’t work for less than minimum wage in our own country, and by the way, that will be really good for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.”
And here we go, yet again.
NRP reports that the foreign-born workforce has grown by nearly 1.5 million people over the past 12 months, while the native-born workforce has shrunk by 768,000 people, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The bottom line: without immigrant workers, the U.S. economy would likely be shrinking.
VANCE: “If you look at what was so different about Donald Trump’s tax cuts, even from previous Republican tax cut plans, is that a lot of those resources went to giving more take-home pay to middle-class and working-class Americans. It was passed in 2017 and you saw an American economic boom unlike we’ve seen in a generation this country.”
That 2017 tax cut is a big part of the reason why the national debt grew by more than $8 trillion during Trump’s four years as president.
According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, more than half of the benefits from the 2017 tax cut went to the top 10 percent of earners, and more than a quarter went to the top 1 percent.
JD Vance has a net worth reported today by USA Today at $10 million.
He just might have a different feel on what middle class and working class is than, you know, people who are actually middle class and working class do.
VANCE: “I think you can make a really good argument that he salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came about. Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”
Interesting take here from JD.
Trump and Republicans during the Trump era actually tried more than 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and when those efforts failed in Congress, they turned their attention to starving it – most notably, cutting funding for advertising and free “navigators” that help people sign up for a health insurance plan on HealthCare.gov, and scrapping federal subsidies intended to help insurance companies reduce their risk of losing money by offering coverage under the ACA.
One other undermining: the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn the law, but the Trump-packed court dismissed the case.
The sum result of these efforts: the number of Americans without health insurance rose by 2.3 million from 2016 to 2019.
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Chris Graham
