JD Vance Slams Mitch McConnell For Vote Against Top Trump Defense Official: ‘Great’ Act of ‘Political Pettiness’
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Vice President JD Vance slammed Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday, after the former longtime GOP leader voted against Elbridge Colby to serve as undersecretary of policy at the Pentagon.
McConnell dropped a scathing statement explaining his vote against Colby, who has long been a controversial figure. “Preparing to deter or defeat an historic alignment of adversaries must be the top priority for the United States and the West. But the more we indulge the fiction that these threats are not linked, and the longer we delay overdue investments in the national defense, the more difficult the task of restoring our credibility, our military capability, and our industrial capacity will become,” McConnell wrote, adding:
Elbridge Colby’s long public record suggests a willingness to discount the complexity of the challenges facing America, the critical value of our allies and partners, and the urgent need to invest in hard power to preserve American primacy. The prioritization that Mr. Colby argues is fresh, new, and urgently needed is, in fact, a return to an Obama-era conception of a la carte geostrategy.
Abandoning Ukraine and Europe and downplaying the Middle East to prioritize the Indo-Pacific is not a clever geopolitical chess move. It is geostrategic self-harm that emboldens our adversaries and drives wedges between America and our allies for them to exploit.
Vance hit back, saying, “Mitch’s vote today—like so much of the last few years of his career—is one of the great acts of political pettiness I’ve ever seen.”
The full Senate confirmed Colby 54-45 with three Democrats joining with Republicans. Sens. Jack Reed (RI), Mark Kelly (AZ), and Elissa Slotkin (MI), who all sit on the Armed Services Committee, voted for Colby.
Political journalist Jacob Rubashkin commented on Vance’s jab, writing, “We’ve come a long way from McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund funneling $33 million to rescue Vance’s campaign in Ohio in 2022.”
