Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance told Megyn Kelly last month that Democrats are calling for an end to the Child Tax Credit because they are “anti-family and anti-kid.” Vance, who has courted controversy for calling Democrats the party of “childless cat ladies,” then declared, “We should send the signal to the culture that we are the pro-family party, and we’re gonna back it up with real policy. We’re the party of parents, we’re the party of kids.”

Republicans are using Vance’s kids and families rhetoric to convince voters to choose them in November, but they are failing when it comes to backing it up. In fact, they’re actively opposing important legislation to help children and parents.

On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would expand the Child Tax Credit — the very policy that Vance has championed and just accused Kamala Harris of opposing. Vance didn’t show up for the vote. Killing the proposal was a loss to roughly 16 million children in low-income working families, who would have benefited from about $700 in tax relief this year. Estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities show that the proposal would have lifted at least 500,000 children above the poverty line and raised the family incomes for at least 5 million more poor children.

The Child Tax Credit isn’t just the most effective policy tool for pulling children out of poverty — it’s also one of the most popular legislative proposals in the country right now. The current bill had bipartisan support when it passed the House in a 357-70 vote in January. Polling showed that 69% of Americans supported the proposal, including 80% of Democrats, 59% of Republicans and 63% of independents. The legislation even included tax cuts for some businesses’ research and development efforts as well as investments that Republicans have long sought.

Influential business groups made it clear that they wanted the bill to pass. But Republican leadership was able to keep it from getting to a vote, even with a majority of the Senate in favor, because 60 votes are needed to break the filibuster.

The big reason that Republicans killed the Child Tax Credit measure appears to have little to do with policy. Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley said the quiet part out loud in January when he noted that it might “make Biden look good.”

Republicans also fought the bigger, temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit that passed in 2021. That legislation was historic, and poverty among children was reduced by 44% to its lowest level on record while it was in effect. But during the last three years, the party demonstrated that it’s still committed to an economic program that puts tax cuts for large corporations above the well-being of children and families.

At the same time, the GOP has blocked legislation to build a universal pre-K system, enact paid family and medical leave, expand subsidies for child care and improve home care for older people and people with disabilities.

Republicans want to have it both ways, touting their pro-family agenda while blocking pro-family legislation.

Democrats shouldn’t just mock Vance’s “childless cat lady” comments or rely on legal cases, even felony convictions, to make their case in the closing months of this election campaign. The party‘s candidates need to make it clear who is standing up for children and parents.

Increasingly, Republicans are framing the parenting issue as an existential question. Focusing on policy for children and families, they argue, demonstrates a commitment to the future.

This is a debate Democrats should welcome — and one they can handily win.

Justin Talbot Zorn is a senior advisor at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Mark Weisbrot is co-director.

Barack Obama was the 44th President of the United States, serving from 2009 until 2017. The former president was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu. His parents, Barack H. Obama Sr. and Stanley Ann Dunham, divorced when Obama was 2 years old. 

Obama’s mother married a man from Indonesia, where the young boy spent much of his earliest years before returning to Honolulu to live with his grandparents. 

Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before he transferred to Columbia University to study political science and international relations. He later went to Harvard Law School in 1988. 

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After his first year of school, he began working at a law firm in Chicago, Sidley & Austin, where he met his future wife Michelle. The two got married in 1992 and welcomed two children together, Malia and Natasha “Sasha.”

Obama’s political tenure began in 1996, when he was elected to the Illinois Senate. In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, and gave the highly anticipated keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. 

In 2007, Obama announced that he would be running for president. He secured the Democratic nomination against former Republican Senator John McCain. Obama ran with the slogan “Change we can believe in.”

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Obama defeated McCain and became the 44th President of the United States, the first African American elected to the position. He was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009.

After four years as president, he ran for a second term. In 2012, he was elected over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. With the conclusion of his second term in office, he delivered his farewell address to the nation on Jan. 10, 2017, from Chicago. 

Before, during and after his eight years as president, Obama penned four novels. His first, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” was published in 1995. He later published “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream” in 2006. 

In 2010, his book “Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters” was released. “A Promised Land,” by Obama, hit bookshelves in 2020. 

This summer more and more voters have gotten to know the gist of Project 2025, the policy opus intended to guide a second Trump administration, and they thoroughly dislike it. Which explains the project’s purported demise in recent days at the Trump campaign’s hands, just as Democrats have jump-started the presidential contest behind Kamala Harris’ candidacy.

The ruthlessness with which Donald Trump and his chief campaign lieutenants supposedly severed any ties to the agenda-setting endeavor gave me flashbacks to Trump’s presidency, when he’d abruptly announce a policy switch or Cabinet member’s firing with a tweet.

Just like that, someone or something that once had Trump’s favor was dispatched with the press of two thumbs on a smartphone’s buttons.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote in a misnamed “truth” on his social media site last month. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” He reiterated that message several times throughout July, blaming “Radical Left Democrats” for “pure disinformation” about his ties to the effort.

As usual, that was all lies, but when the right-wing coalition behind the blueprint, including scores of former Trump advisors, continued to promote it, Trump’s enforcers finally brought out the shiv — a no-holds-barred statement on Tuesday from senior campaign consigliere Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita:

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way. Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.” (Emphasis mine.)

That same day the once-respected, now MAGA-fied Heritage Foundation, the power behind Project 2025, announced that director Paul Dans was out of his job and that the 2-year-old undertaking would throttle back. The Washington Post reported that some contributing authors, who once saw their involvement as a ticket to a job in Trump 2.0, were asking to have their names scratched from the final product. Theirs isn’t an idle fear: LaCivita had threatened an employment ban if Project 2025 collaborators continued to equate their work with Trump’s agenda.

So that’s the end of that? Be skeptical. Be very skeptical.

For one thing, Trump embraced the effort at its start. In a speech at a Heritage conference in 2022, he said it would “detail plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” CNN’s review of the contributors found at least 140 former Trump administration officials, including six Cabinet secretaries.

So, sure, Trump can badmouth the Heritage project now that it’s become a bogeyman. But should he win, he’ll surely make use of Project 2025’s policy prescriptions and its database of 20,000 vetted MAGAts to form a government and execute his stated agenda.

Which gets to the second reason Project 2025 should be considered alive and well: Much of it is Trump’s agenda, just with flesh on the policy bones.

Most of the best known and least popular parts of the project’s 900-plus pages, the ones that media accounts and Democrats have spotlighted — “Can you believe they put that thing in writing?” Harris mockingly asks rally crowds lately — are in fact ideas that Trump himself calls for.

Among them: Abolish the Department of Education. Gut the civil service system and return to a spoils system rewarding MAGA loyalists with federal jobs. Tear down the ethics wall that’s blocked White House interference in Justice Department prosecutions and FBI investigations since Watergate so that Trump can deep-six the criminal cases against him and order up new ones against his enemies.

And more: Mount immigration raids nationwide, with the military’s help, and deport millions living and working here without authorization. Repeal climate change mitigation programs and other environmental regulations. End affirmative action. Undo President Biden’s student loan relief program.

Trump has talked about them all. Where he and Project 2025 mainly diverge is on abortion. Like the rest of us, the former president has seen the decisive power of abortion rights voters in every election since his Supreme Court appointees enabled the reversal of Roe in 2022. He’s desperate to duck talk about further federal abortion restrictions and insists he’d leave the issue to the states. Project 2025, however, proposes a number of federal limits on abortion and contraception, and a ban on shipping the pills that account for nearly two-thirds of abortions.

Let’s say Trump, as president, does leave abortion issues to the states. As we’ve seen already, his antiabortion appointees to the federal courts almost certainly wouldn’t hesitate to rule in ways that affect us all. And that still leaves all those other policy areas where Project 2025 reflects his policy wish list.

Get familiar with Project 2025, if you’re not. Trump’s advisors can welcome the reports of its demise, as they say. But the truth is, reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. The only way to put a stake through the thing is to make sure Trump isn’t returned to the White House.

@jackiekcalmes