JD Vance Gets Another Historic Slap in the Face

Springfield should have been the end of JD Vance. And maybe it still could be.

Weeks after he joined Trump’s ticket, signing up to be the next guy Trump would send a mob to lynch, the junior Senator from Ohio helped launch one of the most viciously racist attacks of the post-Civil Rights era. It made the ads featuring William Horton (called “Willie” in the ad, though not in his life, to make it extra racist) look like a keynote at an NAACP conference. Vance elevated neo-Nazi slanders of Haitian immigrants in Ohio, first to his X account, then into the presidential debate through the mouth of Donald Trump, who charged the whole community with eating pets.

Widely mocked in the moment, the horror of what was being suggested in primetime on national TV scrambled the race and scrambled Kamala Harris’s nearly perfect campaign launch. It also reconfirmed something about the asymmetry of modern political combat: the absence of a national backlash against those barely veiled dog whistles created an atmosphere where Trump could and would get away with almost anything. From mass deportations without reckoning with the present horrors that had to accompany them, to punctuating his campaign in a state he had no chance of winning, just to invoke the aesthetic of a historic Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.

All the while, decent people wondered: where is the rebuke of this obvious exploitation of weaponized hate with absolutely no connection to reality that makes sense without racism, this attempt to destroy the lives of people who had revitalized a small Ohio town, all to gain power for the richest men ever to live at everyone else’s expense? Tim Walz couldn’t even name it — making the mistake Democrats so often do: assuming strategic racism has natural consequences, which is a fantasy Trump exists to disprove.

Well, it’s finally here — thanks in large part to Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

The Vote

On Thursday, the House passed legislation extending Temporary Protected Status for Haiti through 2029, 224–204, with 10 Republicans joining every Democrat in voting yes. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a California independent who caucuses with Republicans, also voted yes. Pressley used a discharge petition — once a rare procedural tool, now a weapon increasingly wielded by a minority that can still muster a majority on specific questions — to force the bill to the floor over the objections of Speaker Mike Johnson and the rest of GOP leadership.

It was the fourth time this Congress that a small bloc of Republicans in losable districts has defied their own leadership to advance legislation opposed by the White House. The White House made clear it will veto the bill if it reaches the President’s desk, and the Senate remains an even larger obstacle. But a Republican-majority-controlled House just voted to protect the people that the party's leader smeared so viciously.

That is a moment worth marking and celebrating, while acknowledging that it’s only the beginning of the long road to repairing this moral atrocity, as this regime aims only to make it worse.

The Stakes

The people this vote attempts to protect are not abstractions. Over 350,000 Haitian nationals live and work in the United States under Temporary Protected Status. Lots of them work in healthcare and elder care, the industries that kept the country’s most vulnerable alive during the pandemic. TPS holders contribute an estimated $4.6 billion annually in federal and state taxes. The United Nations has described conditions in Haiti as a humanitarian crisis. Gang violence and crumbling medical infrastructure make return not a policy choice but a death sentence for some and a life of misery and torture for the rest.

The Trump administration’s position, articulated with characteristic delicacy by Rep. Randy Fine of Florida on the House floor, is that he “came to protect for the good of our country” and that “the only discharge petition I will support is the one that discharges all of these people back to Haiti.” The regime’s legal effort to terminate Haiti TPS is simultaneously before the Supreme Court, where the stakes are existential for hundreds of thousands of people with deep roots in American communities.

How Pressley Did It

Pressley is co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus and represents one of the largest Haitian diaspora communities in the country. She filed her discharge petition months ago, secured the 218 signatures needed to force a floor vote on March 27, managed floor debate herself, and drove the measure through a chamber in which Republicans hold the majority. The underlying bill was introduced by Rep. Laura Gillen of New York, whose Long Island district includes a large Haitian community she promised to protect from her first day in office.

The Haitian community, immigrant rights advocates, healthcare workers, faith leaders, and 183 members of Congress who filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case Miot v. Trump all made themselves impossible to ignore. They did not retreat into polite muzak about the need to get along. They named what was happening, and they did not stop.

Is This Enough?

No. But like the Pope’s rebuke of this regime, Vance’s failed pretensions of being anti-war, and his putting his and the regime’s face on the electoral landslide that swept Putin’s puppet out of the prime ministership of Hungary, it’s a reminder that a reckoning is possible for this man whose only true accomplishments in life are being a billionaire mascot and writing a book that slurred his Appalachian neighbors.

Unfortunately, the White House will veto this bill if it gets that far. The Senate remains a steeper wall. The Supreme Court is still weighing whether to hand the regime a weapon against hundreds of thousands of people who have built lives and families and businesses and communities here. None of that goes away.

But the vote is both a signal and an admonition. A Republican-majority House could not stop the rejection of the central slander that carried JD Vance to the vice presidency. And instead of leading the party he claimed to want to rebuild, he is now our proof of concept — that a man who built a career on the fear of brown children as neighbors, now proudly fathering his fourth, cannot live on lies, manipulation, and smugness forever. And it also suggests what we know deep down: the nightmare of Trumpism is unlikely to survive Trump, especially when embodied by the loathsome duplicity of a fiend like JD Vance.

Let this be a reminder that silence in the face of hate that seeks to capitalize on fear and division, all to aid the plunder of the billionaires who bought JD his career, is both cowardly and foolhardy.

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