Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina on Wednesday night dismissed President Biden’s latest ambitious economic package and accused him of abandoning his pledge to work with Republicans, advancing instead a divisive and partisan agenda.
Delivering his party’s rebuttal to Mr. Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Scott, the sole Black Republican senator, panned the president’s $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, as “big government waste” and unloaded on a litany of issues Republicans have sought to put front and center, including coronavirus lockdowns that shuttered schools, the influx of migrants at the southern border, and protests targeting police brutality against Black Americans.
“America is not a racist country,” Mr. Scott said, invoking his own experience as a Black man from the South. “It’s wrong to try to use our painful past to try to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.”
Mr. Scott leaned heavily on his extraordinary biography to argue against Mr. Biden’s two-pronged infrastructure plan — one measure to bolster the nation’s roads and bridges and another to expand access to education and child care.
“Our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes,” Mr. Scott said Wednesday evening. “We need policies and progress that brings us closer together. For three months, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.”
Mr. Scott, 55, offers a brand of unapologetic conservatism that has helped him rise from the Charleston County Council to national prominence in the Republican Party.
He is seen as a uniting figure in a fractious Congress, and Mr. Scott returned repeatedly throughout his remarks to the theme of partisanship, accusing Democrats of intentionally seeking to push divisive policies through Washington.
“The president who promised to bring us together should not be pushing agendas that tear us apart,” Mr. Scott said. “American families deserve better.”
Mr. Scott was tapped to deliver the rebuttal by the Republican leaders — Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California — at a time when the G.O.P. has been eager to bolster its support with people of color. And during his years in the Senate, Mr. Scott has often provided guidance for his colleagues on matters of race.
Most recently, as the debate about police brutality has intensified, Mr. Scott has offered his own candid experiences on the Senate floor of being racially profiled by police. He has also positioned himself as an informed voice on the challenges facing working families, invoking his early years growing up poor with a single working mother.
As he concluded his address, Mr. Scott, who is deeply religious, drew on themes of redemption and grace. “Our best future will not come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams; it will come from the American people — Black, Hispanic, white, Asian, Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “We are not adversaries. We are all in this together.”
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Tim Scott Will Deliver the Republican's Rebuttal to Biden - The New York Times
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