Vance pushes back on challenging elections, cites Russian collusion hoax

Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, excoriated the Democrats and Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., over their past challenges to election results as Walz urged Americans to accept the results of the presidential elections.

Walz had attacked Trump and the Republicans over his election fraud claims and claiming that unwillingness to accept election results was "tearing our country apart."

"But we have to remember that for years in this country, Democrats protested the results of elections," Vance retorted. "Hillary Clinton in 2016 said that Donald Trump had the election stolen by Vladimir Putin because the Russians bought like $500,000 worth of Facebook ads."

"This has been going on for a long time. And if we want to say that we need to respect the results of the election, I'm on board. But if we want to say, as Tim Walz is saying, that this is just a problem that Republicans have had, I don't buy that," he concluded.

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Vance pressed Walz over the state's abortion laws, contending that the state does not require doctors to provide life-saving care to babies who survived botched abortions.

"I read the Minnesota law that you signed into into law, the statute that you signed into law, it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide life saving care to a baby who survives a botched late term abortion," Vance said. "That is, I think, pro choice, or pro choice, that is fundamentally barbaric."

Walz rejected his categorization of the bill and insisted "the point on this is, is there's a continuation of these guys to try and tell women or to get involved. I use this line on this. Just mind your own business."

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Walz called himself a "knucklehead" and claimed he gets "caught up in the rhetoric" when pressed on his past claims to have been in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Walz did not travel to China until after the conclusion of those protests. When pressed on the matter, however, he did not explain the discrepancy and instead highlighted his background.

"I got the opportunity in the summer of 89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there," he said. "We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China."

"Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They will be the first to tell you I have my heart into my community. I've tried to do the best I can, but I've not been perfect, and I'm a knucklehead at times," he said. "I will say more than anything many times. I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric, but being there the impact it made, the difference it made in my life. I learned a lot about China."

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Walz went on the offense over immigration in the CBS News vice presidential debate, blaming former President Donald Trump for supposedly killing a bipartisan immigration bill.

"We had the fairest and the toughest bill on immigration that this nation's seen," he said. "It was crafted by a conservative senator from Oklahoma, James Lankford. I know him. He's super conservative, but he's a man of principle. Once you get it done. Democrats and Republicans worked on this piece of legislation. The Border Patrol said, 'This is what we need in here.'"

"These are the experts, and the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal said, pass this thing. Kamala Harris helped get there 1500 new border agents, detection for drugs," he went on. "DOJ money to speed up these. The adjudications on this, just what America wants. But as soon as I was getting ready to pass and actually tackle this, Donald Trump said no. Told them to vote against it, because it gives him a campaign issue."

Vance retorted that it was Harris's apathy as the border czar and the Biden administration's repeal of Trump-era executive orders that caused the crisis.

"Look, I think what Tim said just doesn't pass the smell test. For three years, Kamala Harris bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump's border policy," he said. "She did exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country."

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Vance excoriated the Biden-Harris administration's policy toward Iran in the opening row of the vice presidential debate, blaming the White House for funding the Iranian military's operations through sanctions relief.

"Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration," Vance said. "What do they use that money for? They use it to buy weapons that they're now launching against our allies and, God forbid, potentially launching against the United States as well."

Walz, for his part, retorted that Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal and that "Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than they were before because of Donald Trump's fickle leadership."

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Vance and Walz have taken the stage in the CBS News vice presidential debate.

The pair are facing off in New York City at the network's broadcast center. The 90-minute contest will not feature opening statements and neither candidate's microphone will be muted when the other is speaking.

The contest is set to be their only face-off of the 2024 election cycle and follows former President Donald Trump's debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on ABC News last month.