Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance on Sunday defended his 2021 comments about giving more votes to families with children, saying they were a “thought experiment.”
In a widely circulated video clip of 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 without any.
“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control of those votes to the parents of those children,” Vance said in his 2021 speech. “When you go to vote in this country as a parent, you should have more power — you should have more ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have children. We face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have that much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t have nearly the same vote.
In an interview with ABC News on Sunday, Vance, R-Ohio, insisted that his 2021 comments “were not a policy proposal” but a “thought experiment.”
“Democrats said we should give children the right to vote — some Democrats had said we were going to give children the right to vote,” he said. “And I said if we’re going to give rights to kids, we should actually let parents make those votes. Right? I trust a parent to make that decision more than, say, a 14-year-old. So it’s a thought experiment.”
“I’ve been a senator for two years. Have I proposed any legislation on this? Of course not,” he added. “Sometimes people make comments in response to something someone else has said. If it had been a political proposition, I would have done it in two years in the United States Senate.”
Vance doubled down on the statement that his 2021 comment was a “thought experiment” and that his only regret is that “the media and the Kamala Harris campaign frankly misrepresented what I said.”
Vansen’s previous comments about more votes for parents came after a 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 “discipline” the country.
Vance defended his “childless cat ladies” comment last month during an appearance on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show.” He claimed 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 the “childless cat ladies” remark in a taped interview that aired on “Fox & Friends” last week. She said her husband’s “antics” were an attempt to draw attention to US policies that fail to provide the support families need.
“He made a pitch to do a thing that he wanted to do that was meaningful,” 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 going through these three words or that three word sentence because he really said it can be really hard to be a parent in this country and sometimes our practices are designed in a way , which makes it even more difficult.”
“And we should ask ourselves, ‘Why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way they think about the world that makes it so difficult for parents?'” he added.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
