Vice President JD Vance is on the road again to sell the Republicans’ big new tax law

CANTON, Ohio (AP) — Vice President JD Vance used a speech in his home state on Monday to promote the GOP’s sweeping tax-and-border bill as a small group of protesters outside a northeast Ohio steel plant brandished signs critical of the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

Vance spoke to a crowd of steel workers in neon green, orange, yellow and red hardhats and safety glasses gathered inside a rolling mill at Metallus Inc. in Canton. It was his second trip this month as chief promoter of the hodgepodge of conservative priorities that Republicans have dubbed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”

Echoing themes expressed at an industrial machine shop in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, Vance said American workers should be able to keep more of their pay in their pockets and U.S. companies should be rewarded when they grow. He highlighted the law’s new tax deductions on overtime and its breaks on tipped income.

Vance decried Democrats — including U.S. Rep. Emilia Sykes, whose competitive House district he was visiting — for opposing the bill that keeps the current tax rates, which would have otherwise expired later this year.

The legislation cleared the GOP-controlled Congress by the narrowest of margins, with Vance breaking a tie vote in the Senate for the package that also sets aside hundreds of billions of dollars for Trump’s immigration agenda while slashing Medicaid and food stamps.

The vice president is also stepping up his public relations blitz on the bill as the White House tries to deflect attention from the growing controversy over Jeffrey Epstein.

The disgraced financier killed himself, authorities say, in a New York jail cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. Trump and his top allies stoked conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death before Trump returned to the White House and are now reckoning with the consequences of a Justice Department announcement earlier this month that Epstein did indeed die by suicide and that no further documents about the case would be released.

Vance insisted that the administration of President Donald Trump isn’t trying to cover up information from the investigation that’s in the public interest.

Vance said Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to release all “credible information” but that the process “takes time.” The Justice Department has asked for grand jury transcripts to be made public, but a judge in Florida has rejected that bid while requests remain pending in New York.