Tim Scott | |
|---|---|
 Official portrait, 2013 | |
| United States Senator from South Carolina | |
| Assumed office January 2, 2013 Serving with Lindsey Graham | |
| Preceded by | Jim DeMint |
| Ranking Member of the Senate Aging Committee | |
| Assumed office February 3, 2021 | |
| Preceded by | Bob Casey Jr. |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina's 1st district | |
| In office January 3, 2011 – January 2, 2013 | |
| Preceded by | Henry E. Brown Jr. |
| Succeeded by | Mark Sanford |
| Member of the South Carolina House of Representatives from the 117th district | |
| In office January 3, 2009 – January 3, 2011 | |
| Preceded by | Tom Dantzler |
| Succeeded by | Bill Crosby |
| Member of the Charleston County Council from the 3rd district | |
| In office February 8, 1995 – January 3, 2009 | |
| Preceded by | Keith Summey |
| Succeeded by | Elliott Summey |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Timothy Eugene Scott September 19, 1965 North Charleston, South Carolina, U.S. |
| Political party | Republican |
| Education | Presbyterian College Charleston Southern University (BS) |
| Occupation |
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| Signature |  |
| Website | Senate website Campaign website |
OPINION
MAIN STREET
Who’s Afraid of Tim Scott?
The GOP senator forced the president and vice president to respond to him.
By William McGurn
May 3, 2021
Kamala Harris went first. In the Republican response to Joe Biden’s address to Congress, Sen. Tim Scott avowed that America “is not a racist country.” The next day on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the vice president was asked if she agreed with him.
“I don’t think America is a racist country,” she said, “but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today.”
The following day, it was President Biden’s turn. In an interview with NBC’s “Today,” he, too, was asked about Mr. Scott’s characterization—and he, too, agreed. “I don’t think America’s racist,” he said, “but I think the overhang from all of the Jim Crow [laws], and before that slavery, have had a cost, and we have to deal with it.”
Though no one was impolite enough to bring it up, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris would never have said what they did if the black Republican senator from South Carolina hadn’t used his moment to force their hands. Essentially, he dared them to speak aloud the logical conclusion from all their repeated references to systemic racism and the threat of white supremacy. Wisely recognizing that this would be political poison, they flinched.
How different from only two weeks ago, when a Columbus, Ohio, police officer saved the life of a black teenager by shooting another black teen about to stab her. Asked about it, White House press secretary Jen Psaki went right for the progressive go-to: “Black women and girls, like black men and boys, experience higher rates of police violence.”
That’s the trouble with narratives. They are one size fits all, with no room for considering the individual case on its merits and particular circumstances. This is what Mr. Scott was referring to when he suggested race is used as “a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants”—by slamming anyone who raises an inconvenient fact as racist or dismissing speech as invalid based solely on the speaker’s racial identity.
As Mr. Scott put it, “It’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.” But this is precisely what narratives do—and in fact are meant to do.
It isn’t only race. Mr. Biden and the Democrats are using larger narratives to override the hard questions that should be asked regarding $4.5 trillion in new spending. In this way, paid leave becomes “infrastructure,” paying your “fair share” always means paying more, and a bill can be “bipartisan” even if it’s rammed through without a single Republican vote.
Again, Mr. Scott calmly took it on. He characterized the “family plan” announced that night by Mr. Biden as “even more taxing, even more spending, to put Washington even more in the middle of your life—from the cradle to college.” More striking, he tethered Republican policy counterproposals to classic principles such as the dignity of work, the trust that ordinary Americans can make decisions for themselves, and the benefits that Americans have enjoyed when policies flow from these principles.
It was as much a moral message as a practical one: “Just before Covid, we had the most inclusive economy in my lifetime. The lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians and a 70-year low—nearly—for women. Hear me: Wages were growing faster for the bottom than at the top. The bottom 25% saw their wages rise faster than the top 25%.”
Now, it is true that Mr. Scott, as an African-American, is better positioned than a white Republican to push back on progressive race narratives. Then again, a white Republican never has to face the ugly treatment reserved for African-American conservatives and Republicans who dare challenge the prevailing progressive pieties.
As we saw after his speech, progressive bigotry can be as crude as the more traditional varieties: “Uncle Tim,” an unsubtle way to call Mr. Scott an “Uncle Tom,” trended on Twitter; a Texas county chairman of the Democratic Party called him an “Oreo” in a Facebook post; and white liberals such as Jimmy Kimmel and Joy Behar condescended to the senator, apparently believing him in desperate need of celebrity instruction on race and racism.
The sweet irony is that it has all backfired, notably by proving true Mr. Scott’s complaints about progressive hate. Even sweeter, in a Republican Party working to define itself post-Trump, these liberal slurs have served only to elevate Mr. Scott’s national standing as a powerful and promising party leader.
So chalk one up for the senator, the first American politician in memory to pull off a televised response to a presidential address to Congress that upstaged the president himself. So effective was Mr. Scott that the president and vice president not only ended up having to respond to him—but had to admit he was right.
And that’s just what makes it sting.
Appeared in the May 4, 2021, print edition.
