Vance criticized an infrastructure law as a candidate then embraced it as a senator
WASHINGTON — While campaigning for the Senate two years ago, J.D. Vance sharply criticized a bipartisan 2021 bill to invest more than $1 trillion in America’s crumbling infrastructure. stuff.”
That hasn’t stopped the first-term Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee from requesting more than $200 million in federal money made available through the law for projects across his state, according to records reviewed by The Associated Press facts.
Vance is hardly alone among Republicans who have condemned spending under Democratic President Joe Biden, only to reap the benefits later when government money flowed to popular projects at home. In this case, he also criticized the performance of one of the bill’s authors: former Senator Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican he succeeded.
“I believe you should campaign how you govern so that you are consistent in your message and voters know what they’re going to get,” said Ohio Sen. Matt Dolan, one of Vance’s top Republican rivals in 2022, who is the only Republican candidate. to support the bill.
Parker Magid, a spokesman for Vance, said: “Senators are chosen by their voters to fight for them in Washington, regardless of the party in charge. The fact is that this bill was a wish list of destructive Biden-Harris policy proposals and was over 1,000 pages long, but as his constituents expect him to do, Senator Vance successfully advocated for full and fair consideration of legitimate spending on Ohio projects by the federal government. .”
For the man who defeated Vance in the general election, former Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan, Vance’s pivot “fits the general pattern of being two-faced on just about everything.”
“Look at the Trump stuff,” Ryan said. “He was ‘America’s Hitler,’” Vance said, “and when it no longer served him to have that opinion, he changed it.”
Trump had vowed to pass an infrastructure bill when he was president but didn’t come up with a plan, and “Infrastructure Week” became something of a punchline.
That changed after Biden became president. A bipartisan group of senators, including Portman and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a Democrat at the time, came up with a roughly $1 trillion package that passed when 19 Republicans joined Democrats.
Vance criticized the bill as a nonsense tainted by Democrats’ preoccupation with racial justice.
“I’m reading this new infrastructure bill, and it has all these ridiculous references to things called transportation equity, which is really just importing critical race theory into our country’s infrastructure programs,” Vance tweeted in August 2021. “ It is completely ridiculous and it is clear that Republicans supported this bill.”
During a September 2021 interview with CBS News, Vance said that the “mistake Republicans have made recently on bipartisanship is that we gave the Democrats a huge victory.”
“We do have infrastructure problems, but I don’t think this bill actually spends the money on the things we need,” he said of the legislation, which Trump opposed.
Portman, who cited “partisan gridlock” as the reason he resigned from the Senate, was unavailable for comment.
After taking office in January 2023, Vance appears to have warmed to the legislation his predecessor helped write – albeit not publicly.
In 10 letters addressed to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg sent between 2023 and 2024, Vance requested more than $213 million to be made available through the law for projects in Ohio, according to copies of his correspondence obtained by the AP. At least four of those projects have been approved and are expected to generate about $130 million, federal data shows.
Toledo received nearly $20 million to revitalize a predominantly black area that was isolated from the city center when Interstate 75 was built in the 1960s. Toledo officials described the planning decision behind the highway’s location as “discriminatory” in their federal application for funding.
“These once-thriving communities now suffer from the city’s highest poverty, unemployment and blight rates,” the filing said. “Historically, this predominantly Black area has been disproportionately affected by harmful transportation policy decisions.” The filing stated that this policy “caused displacement from which the area has never fully recovered.”
Vance had previously mocked a journalist who asked Buttigieg about the bias underlying decades-old planning decisions. “Nothing in our country is working,” he tweeted in November 2021. “And our reporters ask about the racism on our roads?”
As a senator, he wrote that the Toledo project had potentially “far-reaching” benefits, though he did include a disclaimer that he opposed “the Biden administration’s emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion over the results of meaningful infrastructure improvements.”
In another case, Vance demanded $29 million for low- or no-emission buses. Vance has repeatedly railed against Democratic efforts to reduce emissions. In a recent op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, he highlighted Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration’s support for zero-emissions efforts, arguing that these “will undermine investments in the coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants that the Americans are dependent on, suffocating. .”
Dolan, Vance’s main rival in 2022, said he is pleased that the senator appears to have changed his mind on the bill.
“The talking points during a campaign sometimes don’t match the responsibility of governing,” Dolan said. “I think the two are indistinguishable. That is what it means to be a public servant.”
He said if lawmakers “rejected those dollars for political reasons, Ohio would suffer.”