Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance and allies of his Democratic rival, Tim Walz, exchanged fire in Pittsburgh Thursday over each ticket’s military policy, and their records of military service.
Before an audience of veterans at a VFW lodge in Lower Burrell, Vance reprised an ongoing attack on Walz’s past statements about his military record.
Vance, who served four years in the U.S. Marines including a stint in Iraq as a military reporter, said he applauded Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard.
“This is not about disparaging anybody's service,” Vance said. “This is about disparaging the dishonesty.”
Vance was referencing a 2018 statement in which Walz implied that he served in combat — a remark that Democrats have characterized as an accidental misstatement. Vance also criticized Walz for retiring a couple of months before his unit was deployed to Iraq in 2006.
Walz stated on his website months before the deployment that he knew it might be happening in the future. But his unit was not formally notified of the deployment until two months after Walz had retired.
Former Democratic Congressman Conor Lamb, who himself served as a lawyer in the Marines, defended Walz during a rebuttal press conference Thursday. He said Walz ran for Congress in opposition to the war in Iraq.
“He played an important role in helping shine a light on some of the failures of that policy,” Lamb said.
Lamb contrasted Walz’s service with that of former President Donald Trump, who avoided service five times during the Vietnam War because of bone spurs in his foot. And Lamb said that while Walz misspoke in 2018, “If you want to make this campaign about who has more instances of misspeaking, I think we could pretty much settle the entire thing today.”.
He noted that during a recent interview with Elon Musk, Trump reportedly misspoke 162 times, according to NPR.
Just prior to his Lower Burrell appearance, Vance’s campaign confirmed that he and Walz had agreed to a debate on Oct. 1. Vance said he wants to do more debates with Walz because the Democratic ticket hasn’t done enough unscripted campaigning for Harris to have proven she can handle the job.
“She never stands before the American people without a script. She never talks to voters unless a teleprompter is right in the middle of them,” Vance said. “This is not a person who we should trust to sit in a private room with XI Jinping and Vladimir Putin.”
Vance also criticized Harris for her role in the decision to leave Afghanistan, a move which ended in chaos and the deaths of 13 American service members. (Noting that Thursday marked the third anniversary of the event, Vance held a moment of silence for those who died.)
“They tried to shut the airport before they got everybody out, one of the most catastrophic mistakes in the history of the US military,” said Vance, who called it a “totally unforced error from Kamala Harris and a total failure of leadership.”
At the time, Harris said she had played a key role in helping President Joe Biden to make the decision to withdraw.
Lamb criticized Vance for standing by Trump, who he said has insulted military veterans, such as John McCain, for getting captured during war. And Lamb said Vance had not passed a single piece of legislation to support veterans in the Senate. Two of the congressmen who spoke before Vance were also veterans, but Lamb said they both voted against the PACT Act, which expanded health care for veterans.
“The question in this election coming up, it's not, ‘Who was GI Joe in the war?’ It's, ‘Who's going to fight for the GI Bill?’” Lamb said. “What are you going to do for the veterans tomorrow and next year and five years from now?”
Vance’s speech championed a policy that Trump supports: Veterans Choice. The plan allows veterans to get health care from a private provider in some cases. Democrats, including Walz and Lamb, have said the measure is an attempt to lay the groundwork for privatizing the VA health care system.
During Trump’s transition into office in 2016, Lamb said, “Trump was sitting on the patio of Mar-A-Lago with a few of his corporate friends, figuring out how they're going to strip the VA and sell it off to the private sector.”
