Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance on Sunday defended his 2021 comments about allocating more votes to people with children, saying they were a “thought experiment.”
In a widely circulated video clip from a 2021 speech he gave to a conservative organization called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Vance suggested giving more votes to people with children than to people who have none.
“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” Vance said in his 2021 speech. “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. Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
During an interview on ABC News on Sunday, Vance, R-Ohio, maintained that his 2021 comment was “not a policy proposal,” but 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,” he said. “And I said, well, if we’re going to give the rights to the children, then we should actually just allow the parents to cast those votes. Right? I trust a parent more with a decision like that than I do, say, a 14-year-old. So, it’s a thought experiment.”
“I’ve been a senator for two years. Have I proposed any legislation to that effect? Of course not,” he added. “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.”
Vance doubled down on his statement that his 2021 comment was a “thought experiment” and that he only regrets that “the media and the Kamala Harris campaign has frankly distorted what I said.”
Vance’s past comments about giving parents more votes resurfaced in the wake of backlash over his 2021 remarks about “childless cat ladies” running the country. In a 2021 interview on then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show, Vance referred to Harris as one of the “childless cat ladies” who want to make the country “miserable.”
Vance defended his “childless cat ladies” comment last month in an appearance on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show.” He insisted that the remark was a “sarcastic comment” and accused the media of “focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said.”
His wife, Usha Vance, also came to his defense when asked about his “childless cat ladies” remark during a taped interview that aired on “Fox & Friends” last week. She said her husband’s “quip” was an effort to bring attention to U.S. policies that fall short of providing the support families need.
“He made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive,” Usha Vance said on “Fox & Friends.” “And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase, because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder.”
“And we should be asking ourselves, ‘Why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents?’” she added.
