Tim Scott’s folly
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina’s first decision as a potential presidential candidate was so ill-conceived, it should all but disqualify him as a contender to be taken seriously. As a backdrop for the launch of his exploratory committee, he chose Fort Sumter in his home state.
“On this day, April 12, 1861, in this harbor the first shots of the Civil War were fired,” he said in a video. In its “defining moment,” Scott said, “America’s soul was put to the test, and we prevailed.”
Scott then ticked through the stations of the Republican dross about “the liberal agenda” and how “the radical left” is “indoctrinating our children.” But how’s this for indoctrination? He neglected to mention which side fired first — it was the treasonous Confederacy, the original insurrectionists.
If Scott wants to convince voters that he’s a different kind of Republican, peddling lies and butchered history isn’t going to cut it, even with an affable smile.
Since he was appointed to the Senate in 2013 by Nikki Haley, then South Carolina’s governor and now a Republican presidential candidate, Scott has had one distinguishing feature — he is the Senate’s only Black Republican. It remains his only distinguishing feature.
When he was reelected to the Senate last year, Scott said it would be his last term. With his eyes turning toward a presidential run, he’s trying to navigate the tightrope between distancing himself from Donald Trump while clinging to Trumpism to keep the Republican base loyal and seething.
Still, it only took Scott a few days to stumble badly. When asked about the prospect of a federal abortion ban, he struggled to clearly state his position. Scott is against abortion rights, but Republicans’ hard line on reproductive choice is already costing them elections. Scott seemed surprised that he would be asked a question about something that’s been top of mind for many voters since the Supreme Court’s conservatives overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
In their stridency, Republicans have forfeited the right to be vague about abortion restrictions. It should be the same when it comes to Trump. At his launch, Scott never mentioned the twice-impeached, one-term, now-indicted former president. But in every other way he sounded exactly like the senator who voted with Trump more than 90 percent of the time.
I won’t call Scott a prop as others often have. But his Republican colleagues don’t hesitate to get his melanin in front of microphones and cameras as a shield against accusations of racism or when police violence claims another Black person’s life.
After George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, Scott was sent to work with Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey to hammer out a comprehensive police reform bill. In that heady moment of promised reckonings, Scott and Booker offered the optics of hope — the only Black men in the Senate crossing the aisle to ensure that Floyd’s death would have some productive outcome.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed in the Democratic-controlled House. But talks between Booker and Scott eventually imploded. Senate Republicans never wanted any bill, and Scott — whose own experiences with racial profiling were deployed to boost beliefs that Republicans were serious about police reform — achieved what he was sent to do: He scuttled the plan.
Scott later lied on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the bill collapsed because he refused to “participate in reducing funding for the police after we saw major city after major city defund the police.” No major city defunded its police. In an interview with Mother Jones, Booker, one of the bill’s original co-authors, said, “My Republican negotiating partner was not willing to embrace so much of the change that we had agreed upon.”
Don’t expect Scott to say anything about police reform. Instead he’s accusing Democrats of choosing “a culture of grievance over greatness” and are “promoting victimhood instead of personal responsibility.”
Of course, no one promotes grievance and victimhood more ardently than Republicans who tried to violently disrupt the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021. Scott is not an election denier, but he’ll need to do a lot more to not only separate himself from Trump, but convince Republicans that he’s the man who could beat him.
Should he choose to run, Scott’s greatest liability won’t be his amateur-hour mistakes in tripping over his political positions. It will be the fact that he’s less of an off-ramp from Trumpism than another bend in the same old road, one that won’t will lead him to the White House.