It is Black History Month, and the one Black Republican in the Senate has an opportunity to lift his voice and sing a new verse of black history.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is the GOP’s point man on police reform. He has been working with Sen. Cory Booker (D -N.J.) on a congressional response to police abuse since May 2020, when George Floyd died under a Minneapolis policeman’s knee.
Now, the beating death of another Black man, Tyre Nichols, allegedly at the hands of five Black policemen in Memphis, has led President Biden to ask why the Senate has not done anything about police reform.
Police reform bills passed the House twice since 2020. And twice the bills died in the Senate for lack of GOP support.
As the lone Black Republican in the Senate, Scott is the GOP’s leading voice on the bill. But so far, he has not used that leverage to convince fellow Republicans to back police reform — any police reform.
The hard political question for Sen. Scott is, why?
Is it because it might damage his chances to be on the GOP’s 2024 presidential ticket?
A lot of Democrats, including me, are looking to the 57-year-old Scott to break the logjam by insisting to his mostly white Republican colleagues that police reform is important to the future of a multiracial democracy.
Scott has the power. I have heard him speak eloquently about his own personal experience of being treated unfairly by police. By his account, he was stopped by police — including seven times in one year — without good reason.
President Biden did not call out Scott’s name at the State of the Union address last week. But as Biden spoke, a lot of eyes turned to Scott. Biden said what happened to Nichols in Memphis “happens too often — we have to do better.”
The president then quoted Nichols’s mom as saying that “something good must come of this.” Finally, in his own words, Biden called on Congress — and, by inference, Scott — to “do what we know in our hearts we need to do … finish the job on police reform.”
Prospects for Senate passage of police reform “look dim,” according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight.com. And senators willing to talk on background, including Republicans, said last week they are waiting for Scott to make a deal on police reform.
The current bill would create a national registry of police misconduct to prevent violent officers from being able to avoid scrutiny by “jumping” departments. And it includes a ban on racial profiling, the end of no-knock warrants in federal drug cases, and allowing civil lawsuits against violent policemen.
This is hardly radical legislation. But racial politics weigh heavily on its chances.
Ten years ago, Gallup polling found the GOP to be an 89 percent white party; in an email to me, a Gallup representative provided numbers showing that by 2021 the number had dropped to 85 percent. The overwhelmingly white GOP has a history of positioning itself as the party of “law and order,” willing to push the racial fear button to alarm suburbanites with talk of crime coming near them.
In the 2022 campaigns, GOP advertising found political advantage in labeling Democrats as soft on crime. They have hammered Democrats with responsibility for far-left thinking that led to the mindless slogan “Defund the Police.”
Sen. Scott is also dealing with his party’s consistent refusal to reach out to mainstream Black Americans on issues, from the renewal of the Voting Rights Act to police reform.
It is no accident that Black Republican superstars of recent vintage such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, Congressman Will Hurd of Texas and Congresswoman Mia Love of Utah, got sidelined as the GOP embraced President Trump.
Trump attacked any “Black Lives Matter” sign as a “symbol of hate.” He described people marching for racial justice as “thugs” and “anarchists,” as well as “terrorists.” After Trump lost the 2020 election, at least one of his followers carried the Confederate flag into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
A win for Sen. Scott on any police reform bill would be a first step in reversing the ugly racial divisiveness of the Trump era. But, recently, Sen. Booker said he is negotiating on civil lawsuits against police brutality with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). As for Scott, Booker said he still has hope: “The reality is, we’re two Black men in America.”
This is not the first time I’ve seen a Republican senator who is a person of color lose his grip on important legislation due to racial politics. To my mind, Scott risks becoming the Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) of 2023.
In 2013, Rubio championed a comprehensive immigration reform bill and helped it gain bipartisan support. But under pressure from anti-immigration hardliners in his own party, he flip-flopped and ended up opposing his own bill.
Rubio could have been a transformational, once-in-a-generation figure. As a man of Latino heritage, he had unique leverage with his white Republican colleagues. His grand bargain would have brought millions of undocumented immigrants out of the shadows.
Instead, he sacrificed a reasonable, popular bill by focusing on 2016 presidential politics. He got nothing in return from GOP hardliners.
Don’t make the same mistake, Sen. Scott: Make history.
Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.