“That's become a joke, that they support law enforcement,” Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate nominee in Ohio, told Raw Story. “We’ve got some work to do on our end too, but clearly, it's a joke to say the Republican Party is the party of law enforcement.”
In Ryan’s case, he’s calling out his opponent – Trump-backed “conservative outsider” (according to his campaign website) and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance – for being afraid of Trump and his base. The Ohio Democrat’s case in point: In the wake of the Cincinnati attack, Vance has ripped on the FBI to his thousands of followers, but he’s yet to use his high-profile perch to offer even faint praise for law enforcement – including local and state first responders.
READ: GOP governor’s attacks on GOP nominee are ‘devastating’: Republican lawmaker
“Get some guts,” Ryan continued. “These are moms and dads who work for the FBI. They take their kids to the Bengals games, the Reds games, and their kids play soccer and Little League. Literally, they're members of Ohio, they're members of the community, and you can't say, ‘Hey geez. Thanks. Sorry for this’?”
Vance, a proudly unconventional candidate, and his campaign team have been busy posting on social media since the attack. Most posts have focused on taxes, gas prices, obligatory county fair drop-ins, inflation, etc. Not a single post praising or comforting law enforcement officers. That’s across the various social media platforms plugged on his campaign website – the usuals of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and even GETTR.
In fact, Vance only brought up the Mar-a-Lago raid in two tweets – later reposted on Instagram – both of which question the FBI.
“Little to add on the details of the raid on Trump's home: it is disgraceful and unprecedented,” Vance tweeted at 10:25pm on the night Trump first made the raid public. “The question is what comes next. We either have a Republic or we don’t. If we do, the people who’ve politicized the FBI in recent years will face investigation and prosecution.”
His tweet the following morning – a predictable Hillary Clinton dig – blew up.
Since that e-layup of a tweet spread far and wide on the right, there was the attack on the FBI field office in Ohio. Vance has also been digitally mum as prominent Republicans have unleashed on the agency, some even borrowing from BLM and progressives with their “defund” the FBI rhetoric.
Months before this latest Trump-fueled dust-up, Vance called for the defunding of the ATF (technically, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives).
But Vance has stopped short of going where many far-to-fringe-right Republicans are going in their calls to defund the FBI, but that chorus has only been growing louder.
In Congress, calls to defund the FBI have come from Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) – who is raising money off "Defund the FBI" merch. In New York, GOP House candidate Carl Paladino said Attorney General Merrick Garland “probably should be executed,” before attempting to walk it back, according to The Buffalo News. And former Trump chief strategist and Breitbart News chief executive Steve Bannon has called the FBI the “Gestapo,” before he declared, “We are a threat to the American state.”
Even if Vance stops short of ‘defund,’ he’s a part of this new, MAGA-infused GOP that’s set on dismantling the federal government, starting with purging the current federal workforce. That makes the DOJ an easy target for him.
While Vance wasn’t made available for an interview, his campaign pointed me to his comments to the Toledo Blade.
“The country is way too hot right now,” Vance told the Blade earlier this week. “Politics is way too contentious. The political sides aren’t talking to each other; there are constant attacks. The worst thing you could do in that moment is have the Department of Justice of one side go after the likely presidential candidate of the other side in 2024. …I don’t think it affects my political race, but it could tear the country apart, and I don’t like that.”
To this outsider, there’s a difference between the leaders of the FBI and agents in the field, as Vance explained on The Mark Blazor Show.
“And, obviously, we condemn violent attacks against FBI field offices, but the simple truth is, that's a totally separate question: A wacko who got what was coming to him going into an FBI field office. That's a totally separate question from whether the leadership of the DOJ is conducting itself in a political manner,” Vance said. “And just because a violent guy does a bad thing doesn't mean we're not allowed to criticize our government officials.”
The first-time candidate then ripped the media for “basically saying that Republicans and Trump incited this attack by having the temerity to criticize the leadership of their own government.”
Still, Vance is walking a tightrope.
“Investigate the leadership of the FBI. Investigate the leadership of the DOJ. We know that these guys have engaged – this is besides the Trump stuff – we know that Merrick Garland ordered these guys to go after parents who are protesting at school board meetings,” Vance said on the Hugh Hewitt Show. “There's enough here to actually do real oversight, which is one of the Congress's most important constitutional prerogatives.”
That’s why his opponent, Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, says Vance’s response – and lack thereof – to the assault on Cincinnati’s FBI field office is so telling. Even with prominent Republicans – from former Vice President Mike Pence to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan –now calling out the party’s rank and file over their heated anti-FBI rhetoric, Ryan says the whole GOP has become tainted, especially congressional Republicans – from party leaders on down.
“They haven’t even tweeted or posted anything, including JD Vance, about ‘Thank you’ to law enforcement, local, state highway patrol, FBI – nothing,” Ryan lamented. “Sad. Sad that there's this kind of attack on law enforcement, the FBI. I think it's unAmerican.”
Ryan says it goes deeper. He fears communities across America are going to feel the fallout from all this anti-government rhetoric that’s now routine.
“Part of the broader thing is like, we need to start respecting each other, like who's gonna do these jobs? Police, teachers, public servants? I mean, like, who's gonna hold the communities together if everyone's getting disrespected and you’re looking the other way when someone attacks an FBI field office?” Ryan asked. “I mean, it's wild.”
Throughout this election year, as President Joe Biden’s popularity sagged, slipped, and then slumped, rank and file Democrats have done whatever they can to sell voters their personal, as-local-as-digitally-possible brands. But more moderate Democrats in key states, like Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, etc. are now moving closer to the unpopular president when it comes to issues of ‘law and order.’
While progressives derailed a policing bill before Congress gaveled into its annual month-long August recess, Ryan and other centrist Democrats are pressuring their congressional leaders to take up a measure to bolster local police departments when they return in September.
“I would love to see us do a security bill,” Ryan said. “We don't have enough cops, people aren't going into the profession, and in a lot of my communities, they make like $14 bucks an hour. We can't move forward like this.”
Ryan isn’t expecting much help from the GOP on the policing measure, because many in the GOP have refused to work with Democrats ever since Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Senate Leader Chuck Schumer struck a climate deal.
Ryan’s seen a lot in his two decade’s representing northeast Ohio in Congress, but he says this is a new low for the GOP and it’s something he’s trying to capitalize by presenting himself as a centrist alternative.
“I don't even think there's a Republican Party anymore,” Ryan contends, in a pitch that’s sticking with many fed-up blue-collar workers across Ohio. “I think it's just a bunch of extremists and former Republicans who are looking for a home in the exhausted majority, which is what we're trying to do in our campaign is say, ‘You're welcome to be a part of this.’”
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