“The residents and voters of Carroll County have said that multiple times,” Kiler said. “We have met with governor, a number of his secretaries and delegates, and senators, multiple times. I don’t feel we would have a stronger voice in Annapolis if we had a county executive.”

Kiler said since 1968, county residents have voted against switching to charter government three times.
“The last charter proposal in 1998, was defeated by an almost 3 to 2 margin,” he said. “In addition, Code Home Rule was rejected by the voters three times, most recently in 2006. Based on these precedents, we can only conclude that our citizens are satisfied with the commissioner form of government in Carroll County.”

What do you think about Carroll County changing its form of government?

The Baltimore Sun reader poll is an unscientific survey in which website users volunteer their opinions on the subject of the poll.

To read the results of previous reader polls, click here.

This assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reality is that our political views shape how we perceive the role of government in society, and in the context of the BOE election, they certainly influence how candidates view the role of the school system. This isn’t a call to inject political agendas into our schools, but rather a call for transparency. Voters deserve to understand a candidate’s management style and worldview, which are often closely tied to their political affiliations.

In fact, knowing a BOE candidate’s political affiliation is crucial.

No candidate on the ballot is free from political affiliations. How can you tell? Follow the money.

Take Muri Dueppen and Amanda Jozkowski, who are running as the “Slate for Student Success.” They’ve collectively received donations from prominent Democratic politicians or their campaign committees including Jamie Raskin, Dutch Ruppersberger, David Trone and Sarah Elfreth. They’ve also garnered support from the Carroll County Democratic Central Committee and several other Democrat-aligned PACs.

On the other side of the aisle, candidates Greg Malveaux and Kristen Zihmer have received backing from numerous Republican politicians. Justin Ready, Chris Tomlinson, Haven Shoemaker, Nino Mangione, Susan Krebs and other key Republicans have provided financial support either directly or through their committees, along with nearly all the Republican clubs in Carroll County.

When you cast your vote for the Board of Education, it’s essential to vote your conscience and consider your political affiliations. And be wary of any candidate who claims to be above politics. Transparency about a candidate’s political leanings is not only beneficial but necessary in ensuring that voters make informed decisions about who will influence the future of our children’s education.

Bryan Thompson is a Westminster resident who has four children in Carroll County Public Schools. 

Arguments in favor of liberal abortion laws have remained remarkably stable over time, centered on the rights of the mother rather than the humanity of her child.

To acknowledge an unborn baby is a person is a difficult admission for abortion advocates to make. To do so means they must argue a woman has the right to end the life of another human being, who in this case happens to be her own child. Ethically, that’s a tough argument to make.

So instead, advocates cloak abortion in high-sounding phrases like “women’s health care” and “reproductive rights.”

They talk about terminating a pregnancy, not a child, and refer to the unborn baby as a “fetus,” something that is not a separate person, but merely a part of the mother, effectively dehumanizing the child so ending its life is easier to defend from a moral perspective.

Abortion is said to be nothing more than a medical procedure, something akin to removing an unwanted growth, like a tumor. But tumors don’t feel pain, they don’t react to light and sound and they don’t have a beating heart.

The hard reality is, with each abortion, a baby is killed, which is true no matter what language is used to obfuscate that fact.

Even prominent pro-abortion Democrats seem to know this to be true.

When asked his thoughts on learning of the now-infamous leaked legal draft of the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden responded, “The idea that we’re going to make a judgment that is going to say that no one can make the judgment to choose to abort a child, based on a decision by the Supreme Court, I think goes way overboard.”

Whoopi Goldberg, arguing passionately on The View in support of a woman’s right to an abortion, said, “But you won’t let me make my decision about my body. You are not the person to make that decision. My doctor and myself and my child, that’s who makes the decision.”

I’m not sure what input the child has regarding that decision, but be that as it may.

You might not like their position on abortion, but I commend both Biden and Goldberg for their honesty.

If society is going to condone abortion as a woman’s right, we should at least do so with our eyes open, honestly defining what exactly it is we are allowing, rather than framing the issue in ways that attempt to deflect the public’s attention away from what actually takes place when a woman has an abortion.

We hear chants of “My body, my choice,” but an unborn baby has a body, too. What the baby doesn’t have is a choice.

Democrats have proudly become the party of unfettered abortion, the party that favors giving a woman the right to end the life of her unborn child anytime she pleases. Ten weeks. Fifteen weeks. Forty weeks. It doesn’t matter.

But no matter how proud they may be, Democrats are still careful to avoid mentioning anything about the procedure itself, choosing instead to stick with the poll-tested euphemisms commonly employed when talking about the issue.

Ultimately Americans are going to have to decide. Do we want to live in a society that is ambivalent toward the practice of sacrificing one life to benefit another?

In what other area of life is it acceptable to resolve a problem involving two individuals by killing one of them?

With each pregnancy, we have a responsibility to respect and protect both mother and child. Denying the humanity of either is not morally ambiguous. It’s wrong.

But so is standing on the sidelines and casting dispersions against women who find themselves in desperate circumstances, which is no more compassionate than extinguishing the life of a child whose existence can no longer be denied.

Chris Roemer resides in Finksburg. He can be contacted at chrisroemer1960@gmail.com.

One might think that they would have made this decision back in 2016 when he bragged about groping women. Or, perhaps, early this year when he was found liable for sexual assault.

What about being found guilty of 34 felonies, trying to overturn a presidential election, or encouraging an assault on Congress? Would any of these give them pause?

How about mocking a disabled reporter? Or making a graphic and vulgar sexual suggestion about Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as Trump did last Wednesday on his social media account? Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, called Trump’s comments a “joke.” Would Vance think it was funny if Trump made the same suggestions about his wife?

I thought that Trump’s recounting of the time that he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a billionaire Republican campaign donor would open the eyes of his supporters, at least those with military experience. Trump said that his donor getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom was better than soldiers receiving the Medal of Honor because the Medal of Honor recipients are “in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.” Instead of correcting himself later in the week at a campaign rally, Trump doubled down on his assessment of the value of the Medal of Honor.

Then, this past week, Trump used one of the most sacred places in our nation, Arlington National Cemetery, to stage a campaign photo opportunity, breaking the law against political campaigning there and breaking the rules of taking pictures in a special section of Arlington Cemetery while demonstrating his total lack of respect for the soldiers buried there.

Before the visit, the Trump campaign contacted military officials at the cemetery to review their policies. According to military officials, Trump’s campaign aides were told that federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries. Media sources confirmed that Arlington officials were fearful that Trump would turn the visit into a campaign photo opportunity, against their long-held policy, so they laid out the rules to his campaign staff ahead of his visit.

Trump’s people were told that no reporters or photographers could follow him to the 14-acre plot, known as Section 60, where recent veterans from recent wars are buried. But if there is one thing we have all learned about Trump, he doesn’t think rules apply to him.

According to Arlington and the Pentagon military officials, a female cemetery employee tried to stop Trump’s two photographers from bringing their cameras into Section 60. A campaign aide pushed her aside. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung stated that the cemetery official was having a “mental health episode” at the time, but Arlington officials said she was trying to do her job.

Pictures released by Trump’s campaign showed Trump posing directly behind the burial plots of our nation’s fallen soldiers, wearing a big smile and giving his standard thumbs up. Trump tried to deny to reporters that his campaign took and posted the pictures, even going so far as to blame the Gold Star families. When he was told that the photos and video were taken by his campaign and posted on his campaign’s TikTok site, Trump responded, “I really don’t know anything about it.”

Trump never takes responsibility for his behavior and always tries to blame someone else.

As stated by Paul Eaton, a retired Army general whose father’s remains are interred at Arlington, “It is completely inappropriate to do any kind of political activity on a federal installation, and it is immoral in my terms to conduct any kind of self-serving activity on a cemetery with the graves of our fallen.”

Any veteran who supports Trump after his repeated disregard for our nation’s military, including this recent stunt at Arlington Cemetery, needs to question their own honor and patriotism.

Trump did not visit the grave sites of the 13 soldiers who died in Afghanistan during President Joe Biden’s 2021 withdrawal to honor them. It was intended as a political dig, a campaign stunt against the Biden/Harris administration. Interestingly, he avoided the graves of the 65 soldiers who died during his administration, including 45 combat deaths in Afghanistan under his watch, as documented by the Defense Casualty Analysis System maintained by the Defense Department.

Trump said this year on social media that the attacks on American forces in Syria “would NEVER have happened if I was President, not even a chance.” But it did happen when he was president, more often than during the Biden administration.

Also, Republicans can’t be upset about Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before a football game and then pretend that Trump’s behavior at Arlington Cemetery is acceptable. Unless, that is, they are hypocrites.

Over 80 percent of Republicans, according to the polls, continue to support Trump for president, and I doubt that dishonoring our dead soldiers at Arlington Cemetery will make any difference to them. This is just another example of a very long list of inappropriate behaviors that his supporters choose to ignore or explain away.

Apparently, they, too, have no shame.

Tom Zirpoli is the Laurence J. Adams Distinguished Chair in Special Education Emeritus at McDaniel College. He writes from Westminster. His column appears on Wednesdays. Email him at tzirpoli@mcdaniel.edu.

Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee for president. She did not earn one vote to achieve that status. She just had to stab her boss in the back.

Under progressive leadership, we have become a nation of enablers. All kinds of crimes are no longer taken seriously. Progressive district attorneys refuse to prosecute criminals, and bail reform laws put dangerous repeat offenders back on the street almost immediately.

Antisemitic mobs are protesting in the street, burning the American flag, assaulting police officers and defacing public monuments with hate-filled graffiti. Harris would like to have their vote.

Progressives have cynically and intentionally fragmented this country into competing “identities” based on ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social background and class, and then set about pitting each group against one another. The whole concept of being an American is being washed away by people who see the world in zero-sum terms.

We have a Supreme Court justice who says she can’t tell us what a woman is because she’s not a biologist, and we have a president who wants to “reform” the court so it is more easily subject to political pressure.

Millions of people cross the southern border illegally only to be granted an astounding array of benefits to which American citizens themselves don’t have access.

Progressive cities, which once proudly declared themselves “sanctuaries,” are now struggling to keep up with the cost of caring for illegal migrants and the crimes they commit.

Democrats have condemned millions of poor children to failing public schools, giving them no way out. Only the wealthy are able to make a better choice for their children.

According to the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress, on a single night in January 2023, around 653,104 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States, a more than 12% increase from 2020.

Food prices are up sharply since Biden and Harris took office, and we’re being asked to applaud the fact prices are still rising, only more slowly than they were before.

Making matters worse, instead of promising to rein in the ridiculous level of federal spending, which caused the inflation in the first place, Harris says if elected she will institute federal price controls. That puts her in the company of socialist giants like Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.

At the same time she is proposing socialist strategies to deal with the soaring prices she helped create, Harris is asking you to believe she is no longer a progressive.

Americans are expected to forget everything Harris has ever done or said and accept the new version of the vice president her campaign is carefully crafting to perfectly align with the current political environment.

The level of contempt for the American people required for Harris to believe the electorate will accept whatever she pretends to be to get elected is astounding.

To understand how Harris will govern if elected, one need only look at how she governed previously. What Harris says today means nothing. She’s a politician running for office, and like her boss, she will say whatever’s necessary to win in November.

That Bernie Sanders and the “Squad” are enthusiastic supporters of Harris should tell you everything you need to know about her true political leanings.

Harris’ campaign is based on “magical charisma,” as Jen Psaki put it, and pixie dust, rather than on competence and fitness to serve, which is why she is so hesitant to take questions from the press.

Her campaign knows that if the press ever had the opportunity and inclination to challenge Harris directly, the magic would quickly dissipate under the scrutiny, exposing just how unserious a candidate Harris really is. So, she hides behind an army of surrogates whom her campaign has retained to speak on her behalf.

Nothing in Harris’ past — her record as a California district attorney or U.S. senator, or her performance as vice president — gives me any confidence Harris is ready to sit in the Oval Office.

Right now, Harris strikes me as someone who is playing politics. She’s having a good time and enjoying her moment in the sun, but what she fails to grasp is the utter enormity of the job she is pursuing.

Harris will be overwhelmed and over her head on day one. Global events unfold very quickly and in unpredictable ways, and Harris has a nearly vertical learning curve.

Iran, Russia, China and a whole host of terror groups are all perched like vultures waiting for any sign of weakness or indecision they can exploit. To think Harris has the skill to lead this country through that kind of perilous global environment is wishful thinking — at best.

The world is on fire and I simply cannot see Harris being a match for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This election is as consequential as any in recent memory, and the cost of blind partisanship has suddenly gotten very expensive.

Go ahead, vote for Kamala Harris and see what you get.

Chris Roemer resides in Finksburg. He can be contacted at chrisroemer1960@gmail.com.

They have other similarities, too. Neither understands or appreciates science, especially medical science. Neither has a foundation of basic principles or values — everything with these guys is transactional.

This last point was displayed as Kennedy shopped around for a job with the Kamala Harris and Trump campaigns, offering his endorsement in exchange for a cabinet or other position in their future administration.

Harris — more intelligent than Trump and a person of principle — wanted nothing to do with Kennedy. He then went to Trump and, of course, worked out a deal only two soulless men, who have a history of saying terrible things about each other, could make. Time will tell, but history tells us people who deal with Trump frequently don’t get paid.

The overriding character flaw drawing them together is their lack of shame in telling blatant falsehoods. Kennedy said a falsehood right out of the box as he announced the suspension of his presidential campaign and his endorsement of Trump.

He said: “In Chicago, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times just on the first day … who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention, President Biden was mentioned only twice in four days.”

This is not true and is easily disproven. The New York Times did just that and counted the number of times Republican speakers mentioned Biden during the Republican convention. The number was a bit larger than “twice in four days.” It was 393 times. JD Vance alone mentioned Biden 12 times in his acceptance speech. Heck, Kennedy mentioned Biden 11 times in his Trump endorsement.

Like Trump, Kennedy is not only a liar but a very poor liar in that his lies are so easily disproved. As Philip Bump wrote for the Washington Post, during the announcement, Kennedy “rained bizarre claims and false assertions down upon (reporters), reinforcing indirectly the extent to which even the limited success of his campaign was rooted in his last name rather than his commitment to reality.”

While Trump has said he “knows more than the generals,” Kennedy thinks he knows more than medical experts regarding children’s health. As documented by Daniel Dale, writing for CNN, “Kennedy is one of the country’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists. He has for years used false and misleading claims to undermine public confidence in vaccines that are indeed safe.”

Nevertheless, last summer, Kennedy looked reality in the eye and announced he has “never” urged parents not to have their children vaccinated. Nor, says Kennedy, is he anti-vaccine but just a “proponent of vaccine safety.” The avoidance of reality continued in testimony to Congress when Kennedy continued his big lie and said he has “never been anti-vax” nor has he encouraged the public to “avoid vaccination.”

Roll the tape: In 2021, Kennedy said during a podcast, according to Dale, that “he had personally urged strangers to refrain from vaccinating their babies” and encouraged the public to join him “in telling strangers not to vaccinate their babies.”

He said, “If you’re walking down the street — and I do this now myself … I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby, and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.”

Kennedy has also pushed the false claim that childhood vaccinations cause autism, that the COVID-19 vaccines killed seniors in nursing homes and a variety of other falsehoods aimed at scaring parents from vaccinating their children and discouraging people from getting a COVID-19 vaccine.

Trump and Kennedy are two peas in a pod of falsehoods and misinformation.

With all the weird stuff coming out of Kennedy’s mouth these days, like his story about moving a dead bear to Central Park, one has to wonder how long it will take Trump to say something like, “I never even heard of Kennedy” as he now says about the authors of Project 2025 after the document negatively impacted his campaign.

How will this impact the presidential race? Not much, according to data analysis from pollster Nate Silver, who writes that it may help Trump a little. This makes sense to me. If you were an anti-vax Kennedy supporter, Trump seems to be the logical place to land as both peddle conspiracy theories. Others wonder if Trump’s association with Kennedy will further alienate him from independent, suburban voters.

Finally, I don’t think this relationship will last because Trump and Kennedy are narcissists. On Friday night, Trump gave Kennedy 15 minutes of fame in exchange for his endorsement, but I bet he will provide him with little additional air time in the future. Trump is not known for sharing the stage, especially with someone perceived as a loser.

Just ask Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake.

Tom Zirpoli is the Laurence J. Adams Distinguished Chair in Special Education Emeritus at McDaniel College. He writes from Westminster. His column appears on Wednesdays. Email him at tzirpoli@mcdaniel.edu.

Cellphone notifications are a distraction during class, but so is the urge students have to check their phones, said Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins University professor and public policy researcher. There’s also a “secondhand smoke effect” where students get distracted by other students using their devices.

But many parents have opposed cellphone bans, some wanting the ability to contact their children in case of an emergency. What do you think?

The Baltimore Sun reader poll is an unscientific survey in which website users volunteer their opinions on the subject of the poll.

To read the results of previous reader polls, click here.

What’s your name? Doesn’t matter that much anymore.

It all starts out simple enough. You are born and given a name. But before you’re placed in your mother’s arms, you have a different identity to the hospital system that ushered you aboard the planet, and then you’re in the mix.

The name is no longer enough. There are numbers that follow it and only multiply going forward.

Address, Social Security numbers, dates and place of birth including town, county, state and country. Driver’s license, school and college documents, government I.D. If you join the military services, they will give you a number and warn you that you had better never forget it, or else. I still remember mine.

To marketers, I am bank account numbers, my telephone, credit cards or a prospect list sold on the web. They will never forget me.

Life was easier when that was about the limit of it all.

Before the new and improved health care, you could call your doctor’s office, give a person your name, make the appointment, sign in at the desk and see the doc. Get the prescription, visit the pharmacy, pick up the meds, pay the bill. Go back to the bad habits of an uncluttered life.

These days, for most dealing with the medical world, a name is only the first step that will lead to filling out legal forms running more pages than a textbook on a tiny cellphone keyboard. If you do not fill out clerical work in advance of your appointment, you risk getting a nasty-face emoji. So, everybody lies and checks the boxes saying they read it and understand legalese that would stump a Supreme Court justice. Well, a real legal mind.

My parents drilled home the idea that I would be known for the company I keep, and so would my family name. A bookend to that rule was that your real identity would be reflected by values and character. What you do, more than what you say to be popular.

The Republicans have had their convention. They seemed to spend most of their time calling the Democrats names, talking about how rotten the world is and ignoring the sins of their beloved leader.

So far, the Democrats have taken a more positive, higher road to earn the responsibilities of leadership, and not just victory. They have faith in the future.

Which party stands for who we are? Who we aspire to be? Who we can be with the right effort?

We’re seeing the versions they want us to be. Which one reflects you?

Conventions and campaign slogans are little more than labels.

Labels are like those sticky things you can’t get off the coffee cup you buy; display and presentation are the first chapters in marketing.

Contents are found in the footnotes and, increasingly, in the small print of the warnings.

Dean Minnich writes from Westminster.

In a report Carroll County Public Schools filed in May with the state’s unelected accountability board, the school district acknowledged its plan for implementing the Blueprint is currently misaligned — the school system is spending more than is required in some areas and not enough in others.

For example, according to The Carroll County Times, “the system will exceed the Blueprint-required special education spending minimum by $14.6 million, and the system tops the current state-required special education spending minimum by $25 million in fiscal 2024.” Adherence with the Blueprint’s standards will require a massive reallocation of financial resources on the part of CCPS in order to meet spending minimums in other areas.

Further, while CCPS currently employs the approximate number of teachers it needs system-wide, many of those teachers find themselves in the wrong place under the Blueprint.

The Times reports, CCPS “would have to move around 470 full-time equivalent of teachers to schools with higher concentrations of poverty to fulfill the Blueprint’s mandate without a budgetary increase.”

It was just a matter of time before the Blueprint forced CCPS to move large numbers of its teachers.

Democrats were very deliberate in how they rolled out the Blueprint. The goodies came first. Higher teacher salaries. “Free” community college classes. Prekindergarten classes for 3-year-olds.

Only after teachers and the public became accustomed to receiving these goodies would they be presented with the bill.

But now it seems even Democrats are balking at the cost and oppressive nature of the Blueprint’s mandates. Maryland Governor Wes Moore has said there will have to be “difficult discussions” about the Blueprint, effectively acknowledging it was a purely partisan initiative from the beginning, passed by progressives who totally ignored the objections of lawmakers who represent millions of Marylanders living in large swaths of the state.

Moore needs local elected officials to raise county taxes to help pay for the Blueprint’s enormous unfunded mandates.

He seems to understand that in order for the Blueprint to have any chance of achieving the impact progressives have promised, it must have the buy-in of local boards of education and the citizens they represent.

However, I suspect his real concern is that without Republican support for the Blueprint, when the state and counties inevitably do raise taxes, he and Democrats alone will feel the full brunt of the taxpayers’ wrath.

As long as the Blueprint remains a purely progressive initiative, Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves when the billions of dollars they are spending on the plan fail to meet expectations.

Perhaps the most immediate reason for Moore’s new-found willingness to make changes to the Blueprint is he is hearing from teachers and their union representatives who are upset that so many educators will be forced to transfer to new schools if something is not done.

So, Moore is adopting a “let’s work together” approach, hoping to make necessary “adjustments” to the Blueprint. It’s a shame his party did not have that attitude when it passed the legislation with no Republican support, overriding the veto of former Governor Larry Hogan.

Moore sees political danger ahead for himself and his party, and he is doing what he can to head it off.

Still, the governor’s admission that the Blueprint is flawed and needs to change is a welcome development.

Progressive lawmakers in Annapolis have made it plain they really don’t care what the citizens of Maryland’s conservative counties think about anything, so it would be understandable if state Republicans decided to just let the governor and his party twist in the wind. Democrats own this very expensive boondoggle. It’s all theirs. When it blows up in their face, they will only be reaping what they sowed.

But if the governor genuinely wants to work this out in a way that benefits Maryland’s children regardless of where they live, he and Democratic lawmakers must abandon the Blueprint’s one-size-fits-all approach and acknowledge that all children are not the same. Nor are the schools they attend, or the counties in which they live.

Whatever changes are made to the Blueprint must be flexible enough to allow local boards of education to develop their own plans for meeting the needs of the children they serve rather than being tethered to a plan that may be appropriate for some counties but wholly inappropriate for others.

State Democrats have gotten themselves into a pickle and they now need Republicans to help them avoid the looming fiscal disaster they created.

Carroll’s elected officials, and the officials of likeminded Maryland counties, need to leverage their new-found influence, not only to exact necessary changes to the Blueprint but also to ensure the voices of the people they represent are no longer ignored.

To that end, Carroll’s lawmakers need to make sure nixing the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project, the proposed 70-mile 500,000-volt transmission line, is an important component of that discussion.

Chris Roemer resides in Finksburg. He can be contacted at chrisroemer1960@gmail.com.

I will spare readers the details of Vance’s beliefs about “childless cat ladies” and families who don’t have children. I will say, however, that for a young man of 40 years, Vance has not had enough life experiences to understand how much he doesn’t know about the challenges of ordinary Americans. Then again, the man who picked him as a running mate thinks he knows everything, too. Just ask him.

Vance has said that only families with children are invested in America’s future. Perhaps he would be surprised to learn that a 2021 Pew Research Center study found that only 37 percent of his peers ages 25 to 49 lived with a spouse and had one or more children.

If Vance wants to advocate for American families, he may want to start at home and become a stronger advocate for his wife and children. His wife, Usha Vance, is an Indian American, born to parents who immigrated to America from India. She holds to her Hindu faith.

Like Kamala Harris, Vance’s three children, who are half Indian and half white, are biracial, a common characteristic of Americans today that Donald Trump seems to have trouble understanding. It would have been nice to hear Vance speak up in defense of biracial Americans when his running mate seemed confused about how Harris could talk about her Indian heritage one day and her Black heritage the other, without denying either.

When Vance was questioned about Trump’s attack on Harris’ biracial background, he said that Trump was being “totally reasonable” and called Harris a “chameleon.” This is rich coming from a guy who has changed his name three times, changed his religion, and has significantly changed his politics, especially his opinion of Trump, whom he once called on Twitter “reprehensible” and “an idiot.”

I’m also waiting for Vance to stand up against the racism being thrown at Harris for being Black and Indian. Vance has stated that he loves his wife because “she’s who she is.” Because “she’s not a white person,” said Vance, “we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists.” Of course, these are some of the same folks attacking Harris.
It would be nice for Vance to not only condemn white supremacists when they say stupid things about his wife and the names of his children but to condemn members of his Republican Party who associate with white supremacists.

Vance could advocate for his family, as well as millions of other biracial couples and children in America, by actively rejecting racist groups that support the Republican Party and Republican officials, including Trump.

In a recent interview, Vance was asked how he could join Trump’s presidential ticket when people like Nick Fuentes, a self-admitted and proud white supremacist who has said terrible things about Usha Vance, has dined with Trump in his Florida home. Fuentes criticized Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate and wondered how he could be a “defender of white identity” while being married to a non-white wife. “Clearly,” said Fuentes, “he doesn’t value his racial identity.”

Trump had dinner with Fuentes and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Trump said he didn’t know who Fuentes was but has said little to condemn him or his beliefs. Nor has he condemned West, his friend, for his association with Fuentes and other white supremacists.

Vance seems to be caught in the middle between a beautiful, biracial family and a Republican Party that looks down on his family for their racial identity. He has failed to use his position as the Republican nominee for vice president to educate and advocate to his fellow Republicans that his family is as American as any other and that, in fact, a majority of American families come in different arrangements, colors and religions.

Vance could speak up in no uncertain terms against white supremacists and racists and strongly reject their support of the Republican Party. He could also urge Trump to do the same. Unfortunately, as demonstrated by his inability to stand up for Medal of Honor recipients insulted by Trump this past week, Vance doesn’t have the values or a strong enough backbone to take such positions.

While he wants everyone to have children, Vance and his fellow Republicans have blocked the extension of tax credits for children that cut child poverty by half during the Biden administration. Yet they are willing to give more tax cuts to billionaires.

Vance could also state that he will protect the Affordable Care Act, which provides health care coverage for 45 million American families and has reduced the number of American children without health care by 38 percent.

Ten states under Republican control continue to deny their citizens the benefits of expanded Medicaid coverage for children provided by the ACA. Vance could advocate for these children and encourage those Republicans to do what is right for their state’s children.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation provides state-by-state comparisons of the overall well-being of our nation’s children. The 10 states with the best outcomes for children are mostly Democratic-led states. Most of the 10 states with the worst outcomes for children are Republican-led states. Vance could challenge his fellow Republicans to do better for ordinary families, especially their children.

If Vance wants Americans to have more children, he should advocate for making child care available and affordable so parents don’t have to quit their jobs after having children. Most married couples with children, like the Vance family, include two working parents. Unlike the Vance family, however, most American families are not wealthy.

If he wants Americans to have more children, it would be nice to hear Vance advocate for policies that improve the quality of life for our nation’s children but that he and the GOP have consistently blocked.

Tom Zirpoli is the Laurence J. Adams Distinguished Chair in Special Education Emeritus at McDaniel College. He writes from Westminster. His column appears on Wednesdays. Email him at tzirpoli@mcdaniel.edu.