By JULIE CARR SMYTH, Associated Press
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan and Republican JD Vance deflected accusations of being political lapdogs to their parties Monday, as they met in a heated second debate for Ohio’s open U.S. Senate seat.
Vance used the face-off hosted by Youngstown’s WFMJ-TV to ward off against a little bit of Ryan name-calling from their first debate last week.
Vance, a enterprise capitalist and writer of “Hillbilly Elegy,” said former President Donald Trump was only making a joking reference to a newspaper article when he said Vance had been “kissing my a–” for an endorsement. Vance said everyone on the political rally where Trump made the remark understood it that way.
“The guy who’s subservient to the national party is Tim Ryan,” Vance said, citing Ryan’s voting loyalty toward Democratic President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.
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Ryan retorted, “JD, you retain talking about Nancy Pelosi. If you should run against Nancy Pelosi, move back to San Francisco and run against Nancy Pelosi. You are running against me.”
Ryan said he stood as much as his own party when he once challenged Pelosi for the speakership, and has also supported bipartisan bills alongside retiring GOP Sen. Rob Portman, who has endorsed Vance to take over his seat.
To questions on immigration, police violence and opioid addiction, Vance returned often to the subject of the U.S. border with Mexico, which he said Democrats like Ryan have done too little to guard.
“You’ve got got to shut the border,” he said. “You have to complete the wall and you have got to make it in order that these drug cartels usually are not in a position to use the U.S. southern border as a drug trafficking center.”
Ryan said he has disagreed with Biden on relaxing certain border regulations and commenced the Border Technology Caucus to explore easy methods to use technology to maintain the boundary secure. He said it might be “an enormous mistake” to send Vance to Washington given the record of his anti-addiction nonprofit.
Vance said Ryan’s words didn’t match his record. “You can not pretend to be a defender of border security whenever you voted against border wall funding multiple times.”
On abortion, Vance said that he would vote for the national abortion ban at 15 weeks introduced by Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, but in addition believes in certain exceptions — such that the 10-year-old Ohio rape victim could have gotten her abortion within the state, for instance. He didn’t explicitly say he supports a rape exception, quite implied that her case probably fell under the exception for safeguarding the lifetime of the mother.
He said the problem is simply too complex for him to call all of the exceptions he might support on a debate stage.
“I believe it’s very reasonable to say you can’t abort a baby, especially for elective reasons, after 15 weeks of gestation,” he said. “No civilized country allows it. I don’t desire the US to be an exception.” Current Ohio law allows abortions as much as 20 weeks’ gestation.
Ryan said he would vote to codify the abortion rights previously protected under Roe v. Wade, which generally allowed abortions up under viability, and finds Graham’s bill extreme.
“They don’t seem to be completely satisfied with people having to go to Illinois. They need people to should have a passport and should go to Canada,” he said. “Largest governmental overreach within the history of our lifetime.” he said, calling Vance “not a man who’s able to protect the rights of ladies.”
On police accountability, Vance touted his endorsement by the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police and said he believes adequate protections are in place to root out and discipline bad cops. He said an effort supported by Ryan to strip police of qualified immunity “is why we have now the violent crime on our streets without delay.”
Ryan said Vance’s position didn’t square along with his failure to take seriously the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, where members of the Capitol Police were injured or died.
Vance said the Jan. 6 Committee investigating the siege “has shown from the very starting that it isn’t taken with the reality, that it’s taken with a political hit job” against Trump. He accused Ryan, Democrats and the media of being obsessive about the problem as average Ohioans worry about paying for groceries.
Ryan responded by saying, “If a bunch of individuals storm the Capitol while we’re attempting to file the paperwork for an election, and so they’re trying to stop that from happening and so they need to kill the vp, like, that should be looked into.
“I don’t need to speak about this any greater than anybody else. … But, my God, you’ve got to look into it, JD,” he said.
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