OXON HILL, Maryland —Freshman Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) blasted Attorney General Merrick Garland and called for his ouster during a panel discussion with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
The newest senator from Ohio cited the Department of Justice's actions during Garland's tenure that included charging anti-abortion activist Mark Houck for an altercation outside of a Philadelphia abortion clinic and launching investigations into parents protesting at school board meetings.
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"[Garland] has gone after a pro-life father of seven at his home, arrested him like a hardened criminal; he's gone after parents peacefully protesting at their children's school board meetings; he's had the FBI investigate traditional Catholics as being domestic terrorists; and he won't use the Department of Justice to go after people who are harassing the children of Supreme Court justices," Vance said. "The guy is a disgrace and he needs to go."
Vance spoke at the conference the day after he introduced bipartisan legislation in the U.S. Senate that would tighten railroad safety regulations, especially for trains carrying hazardous materials, amid continuing fallout of the derailment of a Norfolk Southern cargo train in East Palestine, Ohio. The bill was co-sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), John Fetterman (D-PA), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Marco Rubio (R-FL).
A venture capitalist and author, Vance was elected to the Senate in November 2022. The senator was boosted in his campaign by an endorsement from former President Donald Trump and has distinguished himself from his Republican colleagues by embracing a populist policy approach to economic issues, notably embodied by a far more skeptical approach to corporate power and traditional free market ideas that had defined Republican policies for decades.
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During his remarks at the conference, Vance addressed the party's shift toward white working-class voters and said that the GOP is "the party of wage earners [and] the party of taxpayers."
"I think the old Republican party would have seen Merrick Garland applying equal justice in our country unequally, and would have said, 'well, they're in power, the Democrats get to do what they want to do,'" Vance said. "Our attitude is 'look, if we don't stop this dead in its tracks, we're going to lose the very thing that makes life livable for our own voters and for our own people. That's unacceptable."