Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice presidential nominee, and ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl went back and forth over his past comments about “childless cat ladies,” as the Ohio Republican tried to clarify his previous suggestion that parents who have children should have more power than adults who do not have children.
Vance has faced repeated backlash for 2021 remarks during which he told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Putting the comment aside, Karl noted Vance was speaking with Carlson at the time to discuss a “policy proposal” involving “giving extra votes” to those with children.
Vance pushed back on the wording, stating it was not a policy proposal, but rather a “thought experiment.”
“Democrats said we should give children the right to vote — some Democrats had said, ‘We’re going to give children the right to vote.’ But I said, well, if we’re gonna give the rights to the children, then we should actually just allow the parents to cast those votes. Right?” he said during an interview on “This Week.” “I trust a parent more with a decision like that than I do, say, a 14-year-old. So, it’s a thought experiment.”
Vance in 2021 suggested that “when you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our Democratic republic, than people who don’t have kids.”
The remarks have since drawn strong rebuke from the Democrats, who described the senator’s comments as “antifamily.”
“There are, though, policy positions behind my view that the country should become more profamily. Right? One thing I learned as a dad is after our second home, after our second child we brought home, we have three little kids,” he continued. “We got these ridiculous surprise medical billings from the hospital because we had chosen an out-of-network provider, of course, at this most stressful of all imaginable moments.”
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign national spokesperson, attempted to clarify his 2021 remarks regarding childless parents and voting, stating they were “taken out of context and unfairly attacked.”
In a clip of Vance’s full remarks from 2021, the Ohio senator spoke about the difficulties some people face in having kids and said his comments were not about them.
“A lot of people are unable to have kids for very complicated and important reasons. … There are people, of course, for biological reasons, medical reasons that can’t have children. The target of these remarks is not them,” Vance said at the time.
Vance on Sunday said he knew people “would try to misrepresent” his comment.
Karl suggested Vance’s comments were “expressing a principle,” and Vance reiterated that his comments represented a “thought experiment.”
“I’ve been a senator for two years. Have I proposed any legislation to that effect? Of course not,” Vance said. “Sometimes people make remarks in response to something that somebody else has said. If it was a policy proposal, I would have made the policy proposal in my two years in the United States Senate.”
“Yeah, I absolutely do think that being a parent changes you in a profound way. I do not think that we ought to be changing the way that we do votes in this country. I was responding to a Democratic proposal in a very, very thought-experiment way,” he added.
When Karl asked if he regretted the comments, Vance quipped, “I regret that the media and the Kamala Harris campaign has, has frankly distorted what I said.”
Karl then pressed Vance on how it is distorting his words, to which Vance said, “Because they turn this into a policy proposal that I never made.”