On Wednesday night, the South Carolina senator outshined the president.
On Wednesday night, the South Carolina senator outshined the president.
D elivering a response to the State of the Union (or the “joint address to Congress,” as it is technically known during a president’s first term) is an almost impossible task. Yet on Wednesday night, perhaps for the first time in history, the rebuttal was better than the president’s speech.
This was due in part to the fact that President Biden’s speech to a socially distanced crowd of 200 masked (and fully vaccinated) members of Congress lacked all the pomp and circumstance of a normal State of the Union address. Biden missed out on the opportunity to do the best thing a president does during the occasion: honor heroic and inspiring Americans seated in the gallery.
The president’s speech — the typical laundry list that bores political professionals but gets high marks from Americans watching at home — was popular among the smaller-than-usual audience that watched. But Senator Tim Scott’s speech was better on the merits.
Biden sought to claim credit for the pandemic’s abatement during his first 100 days in office, but he didn’t make a persuasive case that a greater number of vaccinations have occurred than otherwise would have if he weren’t president. Scott correctly pointed out that “this administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run!”
“Thanks to Operation Warp Speed and the Trump administration, our country is flooded with safe and effective vaccines,” he added. “Thanks to our bipartisan work last year, job openings are rebounding.”
As Biden implored Congress to spend, spend, spend, he said that more money was needed for education because “research shows, when a young child goes to school — not day care — they’re far more likely to graduate from high school and go to college or something after high school.” Yet in addressing education, Biden missed the opportunity to urge the schools that are still denying children the opportunity to learn in-person five days a week to reopen. Scott deftly hammered the issue during his rebuttal.
“I’m saddened that millions of kids have lost a year of learning when they could not afford to lose a single day,” Scott said. “Other countries did. Private and religious schools did. Science has shown for months that schools are safe. But too often, powerful grown-ups set science aside.”
If there was a weakness in Scott’s speech, it was that he didn’t spend enough time explaining the consequences of too much deficit-spending. Then again, the GOP of 2021 is not trying to make the same case as the GOP of 2011. Scott said Republicans are for plenty of infrastructure spending, just not the trillions in new spending that Biden and congressional Democrats want.
But Scott was very effective in responding to Biden’s push for Congress to pass H.R. 1 because voting rights are “being attacked.”
Scott said that as an “African American who has voted in the South my entire life, I take voting rights personally.” He pointed out that “big majorities of Americans support early voting and big majorities support voter ID, including African Americans and Hispanics,” before turning to the new Georgia voting law. A month ago, Biden called the law “Jim Crow on steroids,” but he didn’t find the time in his 65-minute speech to mention it specifically.
“The state of Georgia passed a law that expands early voting; preserves no-excuse mail-in voting, and, despite what the president claimed, did not reduce Election Day hours,” Scott said. “It will be easier to vote early in Georgia than in Democrat-run New York.” He dismissed H.R. 1 as nothing more than a “Washington power grab.”
Scott was at his best when he spoke of his own family and on the issue of race in America. “I have experienced the pain of discrimination,” he said. “I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason. To be followed around a store while I’m shopping.”
At the same time, Scott made the case that “original sin is never the end of the story. Not in our souls, and not for our nation. The real story is always redemption.” This was, after all, the “country where my grandfather, in his 94 years, saw his family go from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.”
Scott also pointed out that he has experienced “a different kind of intolerance.”
“I get called ‘Uncle Tom’ and the N-word — by ‘progressives’! By liberals!” he said. “Just last week, a national newspaper suggested my family’s poverty was actually privilege . . . because a relative owned land generations before my time.”
Scott said all of this more in disbelief than in anger or outrage. Yet his very existence — as a happy warrior and conservative African American who acknowledges the problem of racism while arguing that “America is not a racist country” — was enough to trigger the Left. As if to prove Scott’s point, liberals on Twitter made the phrase “Uncle Tim” a trending topic.
Since 2016, many Republicans have come to believe that their path to being a successful GOP politician is to mimic Donald Trump in both substance and style. Tim Scott proved on Wednesday night that that isn’t the only way. He proved that it’s possible to effectively fight the Left, the mainstream media, and the Democratic Party by telling the truth with a smile on his face.