Ahead of Thanksgiving, Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance swung through New Albany to stump for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. Vance endorsed the Cleveland-area entrepreneur months ago, at least in part, to stave off the kind of protracted primary Vance had to navigate in 2022.
But while the Republican field in 2024 is narrower, the barbs have been just as cutting.
Moreno has repeatedly staked out maximalist positions, calling for an end to birthright citizenship and accusing his opponents of being “pro-amnesty.” In truth, fellow GOP candidates Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Matt Dolan, R-Chagrin Falls, both take a very conservative stance on immigration. But they acknowledge deporting the millions of people living in the U.S. without documents would be impractical.
Reinforcements
Warming up the town hall crowd, Vance praised Moreno’s immigration stance. “Bernie Moreno is the guy who’s gonna say no more amnesty for illegal aliens, let’s deport people.” Vance added that he and Moreno both oppose additional funding for Ukraine — “sending your tax dollars to corrupt governments overseas.”
Vance has been an outlier when it comes to Ukraine, voicing opposition American involvement from the outset. More recently, he’s been a vocal opponent of a Biden administration plan to advance supplemental funding for Ukraine, Israel and the southern border as a single package. It’s a run-of-the-mill legislative compromise, but Vance bristles at the idea of combining funding for Israel and Ukraine.
“Israel is popular,” he argued. “So, what do you do if you have an unpopular package combined with a popular package? You try to just force them together (and) provide a political fig leaf for an unpopular policy. I don’t like doing that.”
Moreno echoed that point, bluntly insisting he’d vote against legislation that combined the two.
“I’m adamantly opposed to deceiving the American people which is what this stew is,” Moreno argued.
In Vance’s pitch to the crowd, he argued the biggest thing they could do to help him was “send me reinforcements, send me Bernie Moreno.”
Untangling arguments
As his opponents noted in a previous forum, Moreno’s ‘deport them all’ approach presents not just an administrative nightmare but a significant harm to the U.S. economy.
On abortion, Moreno insisted Democrats want to make the 2024 election a referendum on the issue. “We’re not going to let them do that,” he argued. In line with other policymakers, Moreno said Republicans need to put their energy into making it easier for young families to keep a child.
But while he gestured toward rising home prices, his “consensus” policy prescription seems geared toward re-litigating the reproductive rights amendment Ohioans overwhelmingly approved two weeks prior.
“We’re gonna have consensus that Dobbs made the decision primarily a state issue, but we can work towards a national floor of 15 weeks with common sense restrictions on top of that,” he argued.
Federal legislation banning all abortions after 15 weeks, while allowing states to impose even more restrictive provisions might speak to conservatives who oppose abortion, but it’s far from a consensus position. Issue 1’s viability standard bars state law from interfering with access to abortion care through about 22 weeks.
Similarly, Moreno offer contradictory arguments when it comes to Ukraine and Israel. For the latter, he insists the U.S. should expedite weaponry Israel has already ordered but otherwise the U.S. should let them prosecute the war in Gaza as they see fit.
“We have to give them the space to wipe out Hamas,” Moreno insisted. “From day one, we’ve got people on the left calling for a ceasefire, calling for restraint, telling them how to wage this war. That’s exactly what I meant that we should not be doing.”
But at a candidate forum in Medina last month, he argued for the exact opposite in Ukraine, when LaRose and Dolan criticized his opposition to further support.
“When you’re a leader, what you do in a situation like this is you end the killing — you drive towards peace. That’s what we should do,” he insisted. “There’s no peace plan. That’s what disappoints me about my Republican friends, that are this neocon — that want war, endless wars.”
“Listen,” he argued, “we should be figuring out how to solve the crisis to have a peaceful settlement.”
This story was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal and republished here with permission.Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
