JD Vance repeats ‘anti-family’ criticism of Democrats on Sunday morning news show tour

In three interviews broadcast Sunday morning, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, repeated his description of Democrats as “anti-family,” defended former President Donald Trump’s abortion policies and suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris was racist.

Vance – who has been criticized for past comments in which he disparaged “childless cat ladies” and suggested that parents “should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids” – said that his disdain was for Democrats’ policies, not the makeup of their families. He added that the idea of giving children the right to vote but letting their parents have control of the votes, which he floated in 2021, had been a “thought experiment” that he hadn’t really meant.

“I’m pro-family,” he said on CNN. “I want us to have more families. And obviously sometimes it doesn’t work out, sometimes for medical reasons, sometimes because you don’t meet the right person. But the point is that our country has become anti-family in its public policy.”

He told ABC News of the idea of giving parents more votes through their children, “If it was a policy proposal, I would have made the policy proposal in my two years in the United States Senate.”

In all three interviews, with CNN, ABC News and CBS News, Vance said he supported expanding the child tax credit and enacting protections against surprise medical bills for people who see out-of-network providers for childbirth.

President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats expanded the child tax credit in 2021 as a pandemic relief measure and tried to make the expansion permanent, but congressional Republicans (and one Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia) blocked it, and the extension expired. Harris wants to restore it, and Vance recently missed a Senate vote, which he called a “show vote” Sunday, to do so.

The Biden administration has also carried out and endorsed a policy signed by Trump that limits some surprise medical bills.

Vance said on CBS that when Trump gave an incoherent answer to a question last week about whether he would direct the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, he might not have heard the question properly.

“He just wants to make sure that drugs are safe and effective before they’re out there in the market, and of course that doctors are properly controlling this stuff so that people don’t get hurt,” he said. More than 100 scientific studies have found that mifepristone and misoprostol, another drug with which it is often used, are safe.

He was also asked about mifepristone in his CNN interview, and he noted that Trump said during the presidential debate in June that he supported a Supreme Court ruling that maintained access to the drug.

When the interviewer, Dana Bash, pointed out that the court had ruled only that the plaintiffs in that case didn’t have standing and had not addressed the substance of the case, Vance said that Trump supported leaving abortion policy to individual states. States have no control over whether the FDA maintains its approval of mifepristone.

Jonathan Karl of ABC and Margaret Brennan of CBS asked Vance about the fact that Trump met in 2022 with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who has attacked Vance for marrying an Indian American woman.

“What kind of values does a man have to marry somebody that far outside your race, who isn’t even a Christian?” Fuentes said last month.

Vance told CBS that Fuentes was “a total loser” but, on ABC, defended Trump for meeting with him.

“The one thing I like about Donald Trump, Jon, is that he actually will talk to anybody, but just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views,” he told Karl. “And look, I mean, Donald Trump’s spent a lot of quality time with my wife. Every time he sees her, he gives her a hug, tells her she’s beautiful and jokes around with her a little bit.”

He suggested that Harris, who is Black and Indian American, was the real racist because the Biden administration – which he called “the Harris administration” – created a program through the Inflation Reduction Act to compensate farmers whom the federal government had previously discriminated against. Farmers of any ethnicity are eligible if they experienced discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation or religion.

“I don’t think you’ve seen anything like what we’ve seen from Kamala Harris when it comes to handing out government benefits based on people’s immutable characteristics – the actual legal enshrinement of discrimination in this country,” he said on CBS.

Harris’ campaign focused on Vance’s abortion comments in its response to his interviews. “JD Vance and Donald Trump are going to ban medication abortion, making sure they make decisions in getting between you and your doctor,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris’ running mate, said in a video that the campaign pointed to. “Vice President Harris and I will make sure that you make your health care decisions, because we have a rule, whether you’d make the same decision as someone else: Just mind your own damn business.”

Vance’s casting of Harris as the primary party responsible for the Biden administration’s policies meshed with a claim he made in another of his interviews, with Bash on CNN: that Harris must have been “calling the shots” because, he suggested, Biden was too cognitively impaired to have done anything on his own.

“Kamala Harris has been calling the shots?” Bash asked. “Says who?”

“I think she has to have been, right?” Vance replied. “Because if she’s not calling the shots, Dana, then who is?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.