Wall Street Journal - Who is afraid of Tim Scott?

Tim Scott
Official portrait, 2013
United States Senator from South Carolina
Incumbent
Assumed office January 2, 2013 Serving with Lindsey Graham
Preceded by	Jim DeMint
Ranking Member of the Senate Aging Committee
Incumbent
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 (age 55) North Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Education	Presbyterian College Charleston Southern University (BS)
Occupation	Politician businessman financier
Signature
Website	Senate website Campaign website

Wall Street Journal

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.

There is only one black Republican senator.

Tim Scott

He recounted being pulled over by the police seven times in one year “for driving a new car” and said he had been stopped on Capitol Hill by a police officer who did not believe he was a senator, despite wearing a members-only pin.

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New York Times

Tim Scott, Once Quiet on Matters of Race, Embraces Key Role on Police Reform

The sole black Republican senator cited his personal experiences with racism as a vital perspective to his party’s approach to a law enforcement overhaul.

By Catie Edmondson and Nicholas Fandos

June 16, 2020

WASHINGTON — Senator Tim Scott has spent much of his career trying to avoid letting the color of his skin define his political identity, keeping a line at the ready to offer to new acquaintances: “I am a Christian who is a conservative,” he likes to say, “— and you may have noticed, I’m black.”

But when protests for racial justice erupted across the nation this month, thrusting Republicans onto the defensive as the public clamored for action to address systemic racism in policing, it was Mr. Scott who marched up to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, and asked to write his party’s legislative response. The two men agreed that there was no one better for the job.

The offer, which set in motion the hasty drafting of legislation that Mr. Scott plans to unveil on Wednesday, was the culmination of a subtle transformation for the South Carolina Republican over the past five years. Once determined to make his name on issues like tax cuts and entrepreneurship, rather than his historic status as the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction, Mr. Scott has bit by bit — sometimes reluctantly — become a leader in his party on matters of race.

After years of silence, he has spoken publicly on the Senate floor about being racially profiled by the police as a senator on Capitol Hill. It fell to him in 2017 to privately counsel President Trump about the long history of racism. And last week, Mr. Scott was the one who stood up in a roomful of white Republicans and made a private pitch for a proposal that could answer the strident calls for change — without betraying bedrock party principles.

The emerging bill is expected to be far narrower than the sweeping law enforcement overhaul that Democrats have proposed and far short of what civil rights leaders say is necessary, but its very existence reflects a personal and political journey for Mr. Scott and his view of what can reasonably become law.

“We can all sense the opportunity that is before us,” he said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. “More than at any time I can remember, people of all ages and races are standing up together for the idea that Lady Justice must be blind.”

Friends and colleagues say Mr. Scott’s thinking on matters of race actually began to shift much earlier, in 2015, after his hometown, Charleston, confronted two tragedies in quick succession: the shooting by a white police officer of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, and then the massacre by a white supremacist of nine black churchgoers as they prayed at Emanuel A.M.E. Church. Now, Republicans are looking to Mr. Scott, 54, to be the party’s leading voice in Congress’s first major debate about policing in a quarter-century, injecting an authoritative conservative voice — who, as he might put it, also happens to be African-American — into the mix.

“He has a particular strength in this moment that other people don’t have,” said Mark Sanford, a former congressman and governor of South Carolina who served alongside Mr. Scott. “It’s one thing for a white guy to stand up. It’s a very different thing for a black man to stand up and say, ‘Well, let me tell you about my personal experience.’”

Mr. Scott, who is frequently described as an eternal optimist guided by his faith, has an exceedingly difficult task. He is trying to balance calls from police unions who are resisting changes and civil rights groups that are clamoring for it, as well as conservative members of his own party and liberals like Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and the only other black man in the Senate. He has been quietly keeping Mr. Trump abreast of his work.

His unyielding conservatism has also brought bitter and racist vitriol from the left, where some have accused him of betraying black Americans in service to his predominantly white party.

“Not surprising the last 24 hours have seen a lot of ‘token’ ‘boy’ or ‘you’re being used’ in my mentions,” Mr. Scott wrote on Twitter last week. “Let me get this straight…you DON’T want the person who has faced racial profiling by police, been pulled over dozens of times, or been speaking out for YEARS drafting this?”

Mr. Scott has made clear the bill he plans to introduce Wednesday will look quite different from that of Democrats, which would make it easier to prosecute and hold police officers liable for excessive use of force, outlaw chokeholds, and condition federal grants on anti-bias training and data collection. He has signaled that the reforms in his bill will largely be targeted at the local level, and has explicitly ruled out a Democratic measure to change qualified immunity, which shields police officers from being held legally liable for damages sought by citizens whose constitutional rights are found to have been violated.

“One of the other things that has been a big deal to him is this sense that if you are a black man in politics, you automatically agree with other black people in politics,” said Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma and a close ally who is working with Mr. Scott on the bill. “There is this quiet kind of pigeonholing of people of color to say you all think alike.”

A spokesman declined to make Mr. Scott available for an interview.

Raised by a single mother who worked 16-hour days as a nurse’s aide, Mr. Scott grew up sharing a bedroom with his mother and older brother. He did not see the ocean, which carried his ancestors to the United States as slaves in the early 1800s, until he was a young man.

Mr. Scott has said the trajectory of his life began to change in high school, when he met the owner of a local Chick-fil-A who pushed Mr. Scott, then a high school football star, toward business, laying the foundation for his later embrace of the Republican Party and Mr. Scott’s personal mission statement: to have an impact on the lives of one billion people.

He found faith in college, quit football and contemplated the seminary.

Instead, Mr. Scott went into business, becoming a successful insurance salesman and running, in 1995, for a seat on the Charleston County Council. He eventually rose to chairman and won a seat in the State Legislature. In 2010, as the Tea Party wave was sweeping the country in backlash to the first black president, Barack Obama, Mr. Scott decided to run for Congress.

When the historical significance of the election was pointed out to him by a local reporter, Mr. Scott bristled.

“The relevance of me being black is really, fortunately, irrelevant,” he said then. “The voters voted for a guy who they felt represented their values.”

But in the summer of 2015, Mr. Scott began to focus more intently on matters of race and its significance in America. Within days of the shooting at Emanuel A.M.E., he was standing next to the governor at the time, Nikki Haley, as she called for the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse. (Some senior Republicans were privately frustrated at the time that Mr. Scott, given his status as the lone black Republican in the Senate, had not spoken alongside Ms. Haley, instead choosing to issue a written statement.)

Afterward, Mr. Scott and Representative Trey Gowdy, a fellow South Carolina Republican, traveled around the state holding meetings between police officers and black pastors that Mr. Gowdy said evolved into “frank, raw conversations about the state of our justice system.” Mr. Scott began calling up Mr. Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, each time an officer-involved shooting burst into the news, inquiring about the legality surrounding the use of force and the burden of proof in the justice system.

“Look at that — tell me what you see,” Mr. Gowdy recalled Mr. Scott asking. “He wants to understand what the cop sees. Does the cop see the color of the skin? Or does the cop see a shiny object?”

He introduced an act named after Walter Scott to require local law enforcement agencies to report cases in which police officers fatally shoot civilians, and later provided crucial support for a criminal justice reform push and an attempt with the Senate’s two other black members to make lynching a federal crime.

And to colleagues and the public, he began opening up about his own experience. He recounted being pulled over by the police seven times in one year “for driving a new car” and said he had been stopped on Capitol Hill by a police officer who did not believe he was a senator, despite wearing a members-only pin.

He has endured much worse that he has spoken about far less publicly. In 2011, after Mr. Scott, then a congressman, announced that he would oppose legislation intended to remedy the debt-ceiling crisis, angry callers flooded the lines hurling racial epithets at his aides — many of them people of color. His office shut down its phones for the day.

Mr. Trump’s presidency has presented unique and painful dilemmas for Mr. Scott. He has twice torpedoed judicial nominees selected by the president because of racist writings or actions in their pasts. In both cases, Mr. Scott brought the nominees into his office, people familiar with the matter said, in an attempt to find any sign of remorse or evolution. He could not.

Arguably the most trying episode came after the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., when Mr. Scott publicly condemned Mr. Trump’s suggestion that there had been “very fine people” on “both sides.” His comments got Mr. Scott a summons to the White House and a face-to-face meeting with the president to explain generations of racial hurt.

When Mr. Trump asked what would be helpful to the people his comments had offended, Mr. Scott did not demand any civil rights measure. Instead, he pitched the president on a long-held policy priority, called opportunity zones, that would incentivize companies to invest in areas struggling with economic depression. It became a marquee item in Republicans’ $1.5 trillion tax-cut bill.

“In weighing this dicey situation, I kept in mind that there are some things more important than politics,” Mr. Scott wrote in his memoir. “Namely, that while there may be an ebb and flow in politics, I am going to be black for the rest of my life.”