Maybe trashing refuges is a long-game bet by Vance, the Cincinnati Republican who is presidential nominee Donald J. Trump as Trump’s vice presidential running mate.
It’s a decent gamble: If Trump, now age 78, wins in November but dies mid-term (or is [officially] ruled mentally incompetent to serve as president by the 25th Amendment’s provisions), then James David Vance, now age 40, a self-defined hillbilly from McKinley Street, in Butler County’s Middletown, could succeed Trump. With America’s highest office at stake, defaming Haitian migrants, and disrupting (thanks to haters’ threats) the lives of Springfield’s 58,000 residents, are easy wagers to place with the presidency as grand prize.
Meanwhile, though, perhaps Catholic convert Vance will ponder these words in the book of Leviticus, in Catholics’ traditional Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible: “If a stranger dwell in your land, and abide among you, do not upbraid him: But let him be among you as one of the same country: and you shall love him as yourselves: for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
JD Vance’s life story is remarkable, as are his achievements since he left Middletown. But Vance’s vice presidential campaign antics won’t have aged well when biographers and historians look back at 2024.
With a slight tweak, Vance’s campaigning calls to mind words, written by playwright Robert Bolt, in “A Man for All Seasons,” that Thomas More (Paul Scofield), the Catholic officeholder martyred by Henry VIII, says to an ally of the king: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for [Trump]?”
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All those lie-believing ignoramuses, inside and outside Ohio, shrieking about the purported slaughter of companion animals by Haitians who reside legally in Ohio, ought to take a good look at Ohio’s weak laws on the humane treatment of animals, especially companion animals.
The Humane Society of the United States recently released its “Horrible Hundred, 2024″ – a report on 100 problem puppy mills and puppy sellers in the United States.
The society reported that “for the 12th year in a row, Missouri has the highest number of dealers in the report (23), followed this year by Ohio (20), Iowa (15) and Wisconsin (10).” That’s right, the Buckeye State is proving once again to be a national example of animal neglect.
And the General Assembly has only made matters worse. Late in 2016, amid the hurly-burly of a lame-duck, legislators, by passing Senate Bill 331, legislators yet again violated the Ohio Constitution’s 112-year old guaranty of municipal home rule.
That 2016 bill, according to the National Humane Education Society, subsequently signed by Republican then-Gov. John R. Kasich, “voided [anti-puppy-mill] ordinances passed in Grove City and Toledo, [and] also made it illegal for any [Ohio] city to ban puppy sales from their communities, even if there is reason to believe the puppies were bred in a puppy mill.”
Result: Ohio, “the heart of it all,” is in fact heartless in forbidding communities to regulate puppy sales. That is one of Ohio’s many real animal-welfare challenges – not the brazen lies promoted by Donald Trump and JD Vance about Ohio newcomers eating companion animals in Springfield.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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