The Vance Thing Again: So Bad About So Many Things that His Rank Hypocrisy Is No Longer Even Interesting
J.D. Vance is a walking disaster for some very big reasons, the most important of which include his cruelty toward immigrants (and toward anyone else who happens to be near the blast zone of an anti-immigration stunt gone very bad), his deliberate lying, his sexist/racist/eugenicist worldview, his desire to make divorce more difficult (even for women in violent marriages), and of course his anti-abortion insanity. I discussed all of those issues in a new Verdict column today, "Vance Vance Devolution" (the title of which is a nod to a classic arcade game). It was exhausting even to think about just how awful the guy is.
My double-length Verdict column on Monday and Tuesday of this week, along with my Dorf on Law column on Tuesday, all prominently featured criticisms of Vance along with other matters. Today's Verdict column, however, was all-Vance-all-the-time (with necessary references to Donald Trump along the way). Even after writing all of that, however, there is more to say about Vance on the big issues, and there are also some less existential matters related to the Republican VP nominee. In what I had vainly hoped would be a relatively short column here, I will end a long week with a run-through of some of those remaining issues.
In today's Verdict column, my final topic was Vance's defense of "turning abortion over to the states," which is the current dishonest dodge that Trump and Vance are pushing to try to neutralize a losing political issue for Republicans. I summarized the completely unoriginal point that the argument for turning an issue of fundamental personal rights over to the states has no principled stopping point, making it one of the leading examples of a slippery-slope argument that truly works.
How unoriginal was my argument? On Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" last season, Michael Che set up a joke with this:
This week, Donald Trump said that he supports abortion laws being decided by the states instead of the federal government. But why stop there? Why not go even smaller and leave it up to the county, or the city? Or even better, take the government out it completely and leave the choice about what women can do with their bodies to the person who knows what they can do with them the best?
Because this was a Che joke, the punchline was a deliberately jarring parody of partriarchy: "Their husbands."
In his setup, Che thus summarized the essential point that allowing any level of government to take away bodily autonomy is arbitrary, a point that I explained in today's column by reference to regional differences in Ohio and every other state. Vance had provided fodder for mockery by saying that "we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions," which is silly in treating every state as if it were a monolith in terms of "cultures" and "sensibilities."
I will add here that Vance's framing of the issue -- "If California wants to have a different abortion policy from Ohio, then Ohio has to respect California, and California has to respect Ohio." -- is especially ridiculous, because Ohio's voters have in fact made the same decision about abortion that California's voters made. A year ago, Ohio's Republican Party tried and failed first to change the rules about citizen referenda in order to block an initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state's constitution, and then Republican politicians tried and failed to get people to vote against that ballot initiative.
The larger point is that this has happened in states that are even redder than Ohio, including Montana and Kansas. Indeed, everywhere that the voters have been allowed to decide the issue directly, their cultures and sensibilities have led to the same decision. What Vance is ultimately saying is that he only respects the states whose political systems allow the politicians to prevent their people from deciding -- even at a statewide level -- what they want the government to do and not do when it comes to personal autonomy.
So the familiar slippery-slope argument re federalism is only one reason that Vance's sophistry does not work. Even on his own terms, he can only be saying that the "elites" -- in this case, the local car dealers and right-wing activists who sit in gerrymandered majorities in state legislatures -- are to be trusted to decide whose culture and whose sensibility matters.
That should hardly be surprising, because one of the more galling aspects of Vance's political persona is his faux-populist complaints about billionaires and other shadowy elites. That is hypocritical for all Republicans, of course, but given that Vance is a failed lab experiment funded by a hyper-right-wing tech billionaire, he is in a category of his own.
As I suggested above, Vance's misfires on abortion and federalism, while important, are almost certainly less important than his embrace of fascist anti-immigrant propaganda and his eugenicist views. Also on this level of importance (scary, but not hair-on-fire scary) is his attempt to describe the infamous "concepts of a plan" that he and Trump are supposedly developing to change the American health insurance system. Vance is on the stump every day, and he has recently decided to try to explain how he and Trump will replace the Affordable Care Act. A day ago, he said this:
We're gonna actually implement some regulatory reform in the health care system that allows people to choose a health care plan that works for them. Now what that will also do is allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools, so that makes our health care system work better. It makes it work better for the people with chronic issues, it also makes, uh, makes it work better for everybody else.
Now that is a lulu, which I will explain momentarily. As a threshold matter, however, I should take a moment to refer back to my Verdict column last week in which I called out Republicans and the mainstream press for not understanding what it even means to have a policy discussion. As I explained there, what they typically mean by "policy discussion" is to talk about a social ill but never to offer a proposal to fix that social ill; and on the rare occasions when they do offer a specific policy proposal, they certainly never explain how it would work or why it will solve the problem at hand.
Trump's recent "I'll be the protector of women" creepy nonsense was an especially good example of this kind of completely content-free move: Women sad, Trump solve. What would Trump in fact do? How would it solve the problem? Why even ask such questions?
In that light, Vance's health insurance comments -- somewhat surprisingly -- cover two steps in the process: (1) identifying a specific problem (people who have no health insurance, or are stuck with inadequate coverage), and (2) offering a specific proposal that counts as a "policy" on which Congress could vote (separating people into risk pools). Good on ya so far, J.D. But he obviously still failed to offer a policy discussion, because he simply went from "We'll do X" to "And that will work better for everyone."
Crucially, Vance cannot explain how risk pooling will make things better for everyone, because it would be catastrophic. Putting "people with similar health situations" in the same pools means putting sick people in a pool with other sick people and healthy people in a pool with other healthy people. (I should say "currently healthy," of course, because that is the key point.) This always fails when it is tried, because this kind of risk-pooling leads to what health economists call a "death spiral" in the insurance market.
The point of insurance is to spread risks, not to isolate them. What Vance is describing would guarantee that health insurance for sick people would be either prohibitively expensive or not available at all. That is why the ACA (which is not great, but it is the best system possible for a country that refuses to create single-payer health care) prohibits insurers from discriminating against people on the basis of preexisting conditions. Not only is that prohibition necessary to make a private, for-profit insurance market work at all, it is also one of the reasons that Americans ultimately came around to support the ACA so strongly. They remember how bad it was before, when insurers could deny coverage for people who had been sick at any point in their lives.
As I wrote last week, when Republicans say that they want Trump to "talk policy," the last thing they want is for him actually to talk policy -- his or theirs. Vance came dangerously close to having to explain the logic of how his policy proposal would "work better," but he was savvy enough or confused enough to default to magical thinking.
On every matter of substance that Vance has touched, therefore, he has been a nonstop political liability or a juicy target for Democrats on substance, or both.
Earlier in the campaign, it seemed possible that smaller matters regarding Vance might come to the fore. After the Republicans' convention, for example, New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen's "JD Vance, D.E.I. candidate" pointed out that elite universities give a huge leg up to poor rural kids like Vance in their admissions decisions, meaning that he is a product of a system that uses affirmative action to benefit people like him.
At another point, I had the passing thought that Vance's many name changes offered an interesting possibility of talking about people being able to determine what other people call them. Given the Republican Party's years-long freakout over pronouns -- that is, people like Vance being angry at people who are asking to be respected in how they wish to be addressed -- I considered expanding on a 2023 column in which I had discussed that issue as a matter of simple respect.
Vance, however, has so debased the political discussion that bringing up such relative subtleties is pointless. Why call Vance a hypocrite about names and pronouns when he unblinkingly attacks Kamala Harris for being "a chameleon." Vance is the ultimate chameleon, adapting his views as needed to advance his career and power. His autobiography attacked the people in rural America as lazy and worse, but now he claims to be their champion. His one-eighty on Trump speaks for itself.
All of that, however, has become a series of small afterthoughts. Vance is the guy who mainstreams neo-Nazi propaganda that results in bomb threats at Springfield's schools and government buildings, who thinks that Harris is not a real parent and that only parents have a stake in the country's future, and who says that Springfield's Haitian immigrants are illegal even when the law says otherwise. That guy has made hypocrisy the least of our worries.
Worst of all, Vance not only has 39 more days of campaigning to top himself, but he will surely be one of the people who goes on TV to justify the post-election coup that Trump's team has already put in motion. Vance is incapable of arguing effectively, but he is capable of spewing nonsense with great confidence. And for Trump's purposes, that is all he needs.