Democrats on Capitol Hill are hammering Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) over his charge that they’re “anti-family,” pointing to a host of child-friendly benefits they’ve long championed in the face of Republican opposition.

Vance, the recently tapped running mate of former President Trump, has made waves in recent days for repeatedly accusing Democrats of being the “anti-child” party, citing, among other things, liberal concerns over the human impact on climate change. 

The Democrats are hoping to elevate the issue of working-family struggles heading into November’s elections, highlighting a host of favored proposals — including efforts to expand child tax credits, boost paid family leave and ease child care costs — which they say debunk Vance’s sharp imputations.

“JD Vance’s comments are as unfounded as they are divisive and show just how ill-prepared he would be as Vice President, let alone as possibly president one day,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) said in an email. “The truth is, Democrats are the ones championing the policies that truly support American families and children, biological and non-biological alike.”

Democrats see an opportunity to gain an edge on Vance and Republicans in the Senate this week with a vote on a long-stalled expansion of the child tax credit.

After sailing through the House in January, the tax bill has languished in the upper chamber amid conservative opposition, offering Democrats a chance to cast Republicans as opposing measures that would help children and families.

“I hope Republicans here in the Senate choose to join us,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday on the chamber floor. “Putting senators on record is one way progress is made on important issues. It can bring important issues to the forefront.”

The partisan battle over children, families and which side is doing more to help them is hardly new on Capitol Hill. But it was thrust into prominence this month after reports surfaced revealing that Vance, as a Senate candidate in 2021, had characterized Democratic leaders as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives … and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Among the lawmakers he singled out was Vice President Harris, the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee, who has two stepchildren.

“The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance told Tucker Carlson at the time. 

The reemergence of those comments sparked a storm of controversy around the country and drew criticism from a range of voices, Democratic and Republican alike. Many have been quick to point out America’s rich history of notable childless figures — a list that includes founding luminaries like George Washington, powerful conservative women like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and current GOP Sens. Tim Scott (S.C.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) — and rush to the defense of stepparents and adoptive parents.

The uproar has put Trump in a rare defensive crouch. Appearing Monday on Fox News, he explained to host Laura Ingraham that Vance simply “loves family,” but he also emphasized those without children are “every bit as good as anybody else.”

Vance, for his part, isn’t backing down. In a series of public appearances, he’s doubled down on the insinuation that people without children lack the rich “perspective” unique to parents, while amplifying the accusation that Democrats, as a party, have adopted a position of discouraging procreation. 

“The left has increasingly become explicitly anti-child and anti-family. They’ve encouraged young families not to have children at all, because of concerns over climate change,” Vance, a 39-year-old father of three, told Fox News’s Trey Gowdy this week. 

“This is not a criticism, and was never a criticism, of everybody without children. That is a lie of the left,” he continued. “It is a criticism of the increasingly anti-parent and anti-child attitude of the left.”

The comments aren’t sitting well with Democrats in either chamber, particularly those who have been pushing for years to enact new federal benefits for working families but have hit a wall in the form of Republicans opposed to the creation of new federal programs, the hike in federal spending, or both. 

No Republican, for instance, supported the American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s emergency spending package for addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, which included $24 billion to help child care facilities survive the health crisis. 

”The [GOP] support for child care really eroded in the Trump era. It is one of the most stunning examples of how the Republican Party has sort of walked away from family-friendly economic policy,” a Democratic aide said this week. “There would be no child care industry if we didn’t pass the American Rescue Plan.”

More recently, Project 2025 — a sweeping conservative policy agenda compiled with help from members of Trump’s inner circle — proposes to eliminate Head Start, which provides low-income children with health, education and child care services. Democrats are highlighting the document as yet more evidence that Republicans have it backwards when accusing Democrats of being anti-family.

“Republicans’ Project 2025 would directly harm families—many of them working hard jobs to make ends meet,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) said in an email. “That includes enacting policies that target preschool and afterschool programs, slash Medicaid, cut nutrition programs, and eliminate free school meals. 

“To punish hungry kids is disgraceful,” she added, “but that’s what their plans are.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment on Vance’s remarks or the Democrats’ family benefits agenda. It also declined to comment on the tax proposal to be voted on this week.

Among those Democratic proposals are the Family Act, sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), to create a federal paid family and medical leave program; the Childcare Stabilization Act, sponsored by Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (Mass.), which would boost federal childcare funding to pandemic levels; and the Childcare Is Infrastructure Act, also sponsored by Clark, which provides financial help for educators who pursue child care professionally.

Democrats are framing this year’s election as a referendum on the fate of those bills, while also emphasizing the erosion of women’s reproductive rights enacted by many GOP-led states in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade — a ruling made possible by the addition of three conservative justices under Trump. 

“Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are determined to control if, when, and how you have a family,” Clark said in an email. “They belittle couples struggling to have kids while attempting to ban IVF. They want to impose state-mandated pregnancy while defunding child care and raising taxes on working families. 

“There’s a clear choice in the months ahead.”

The Senate vote on the child tax credit will amplify the debate this week. The tax bill would boost the refundable amount of the child tax credit to $1,900 for 2024 and to $2,000 for 2025. It also has several tax breaks for businesses, including full expensing for research and development costs, accelerated depreciation scheduling, and a looser cap for interest expense deductions.

Republicans have argued against the credit expansion on the grounds that it doesn’t have sufficient work requirements attached to it and that it may be accessible to non-Americans.

“Critically, the bill weakens welfare work requirements and continues a long-standing push by Congress to dress up welfare benefits as ‘tax relief.’ The bill’s cash welfare benefits are socially harmful,” Robert Rector, a fellow at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, wrote in a January analysis of the legislation.

The child tax credit reached rock star status during the pandemic when its expansion raised millions of children out of poverty almost overnight before its lapse lowered them back into poverty.

In 2021, U.S. poverty fell across many metrics, reflecting a general improvement in economic conditions, according to the Census Bureau. Changes to the tax system took 7.3 million children out of poverty. 

The U.S. child poverty rate “more than doubled, from 5.2 percent in 2021 to 12.4 percent in 2022,” the Census Bureau reported in 2023.

While the bill is not expected to pass in the face of a GOP filibuster, Schumer said the vote is nonetheless valuable as a way of putting “pressure on Republicans to show where they stand on important issues.”

“This week, the American people will get a chance to see which senators in reality support tax relief for parents and businesses and housing,” he said, “and who opposes it.”