CHARLESTON, South Carolina — If you had to describe the most Tim Scott thing to do when visiting his hometown here in South Carolina, the Republican senator admits it’s not that complicated: Halls Chophouse on King Street on a weekend afternoon and Seacoast Church in nearby Mount Pleasant with his fellow congregants on Sunday.
The church, which has grown tenfold since he joined in the late 1990s, is where you will find Scott spending most of his time. There is, however, one other place that is pretty dear to his heart.
“Second, I’d say if you really want the little things, I love to go to Halls Chophouse, which is the No. 2 steakhouse in America,” he said of his favorite fine dining experience in Charleston. “I can’t afford to go often, but when I can go, it’s good eating, my friend. Good eating, as we say in the South.”
Yet despite the glitzy white table cloth atmosphere of the iconic steakhouse — a restaurant that boasts not just famous steaks and chops but also selections of Japanese and American Wagyu filets, chilled lobster tails, and quail with roasted gravy — Scott sheepishly admits he only gets one meal when he goes there: meatloaf.
Unlike the other meals that start in the low 40s and escalate up to $165, before you even add a salad or a side dish, Scott’s full dinner comes in way under that.
“It comes with loaded mashed potatoes and green beans,” he said. “All for $13. It’s the greatest meal you can get at a five-star location in America.”
There is a joy that comes with spending time with Scott — a joy that collides with the struggles and setbacks he experienced as a young black teenager growing up in a single-parent home. Instead of making his image all about what he did not have growing up, though, he has made his life of purpose of what he can be. And of course, he has been pretty successful at it, becoming the first-ever black U.S. senator, Republican or Democrat, from South Carolina.
It’s an achievement Scott accomplished by … well, by being himself.
The South Carolina senator began his career in politics in local government before winning a seat in the U.S. House in 2010. In 2013 he was tapped by then-Gov. Nikki Haley for the Senate seat of Jim DeMint, who resigned to become the president of the Heritage Foundation.
One year later, the first black Republican senator from the South since Reconstruction won that seat outright in a special election and easily won again in 2016 for his first full term. This year, he faces state Rep. Krystle Matthews, who won the Democratic primary race late last month over rival Catherine Fleming Bruce.
Just days after winning, Matthews was forced to apologize for the salty words she used, and questionable ethics she seemed to espouse, in leaked audio of a controversial phone call with an inmate earlier in the year that seemed to suggest political subterfuge.
Although his name is constantly brought up as a presidential contender in 2024, Scott says he is focused on the race in front of him right now. Still, every ranking has his seat listed as safe Republican, including the highly regarded Cook Political Report, which also noted his fundraising prowess as the second-largest fundraiser overall this cycle with nearly $42 million brought in. Only Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) has raised more.
Taking nothing for granted, Scott is a tireless campaigner who can be found crisscrossing his home state every time he is done with his votes in Washington.
Legislatively, his top passion for now is getting a criminal justice reform bill done. Even though Democrats long have pushed such reforms, they seem loath to let Scott run point on the effort, so they successfully filibustered his bipartisan JUSTICE Act in 2020.
The acronym stands for the Just and Unifying Solutions to Invigorate Communities Everywhere. Scott had worked on it for years, and the bill included several measures applauded by police reform advocates, including incentives for chokehold bans and grants for body cameras.
Scott said the most important thing we could do on the criminal justice front is make sure that those folks who are arrested repeatedly actually stay incarcerated.
“Unfortunately, the current crime statistics reinforce the fact that not everybody wants to be productive,” he said. “And for those who do not, we should not allow them out.”
Scott said what we’re seeing throughout the country are self-proclaimed “progressive” district attorneys making decisions with progressive judges that have the effect of making the communities to which those recidivists return more dangerous: “I’ve never seen such ineptness and irresponsibility on the behalf of prosecutors and judges in my lifetime.”
When you talk to voters across the state about Scott, one of the things people almost always point to is the speech he gave on the Senate floor after the Senate Democrats stonewalled his legislation on police reform. Many of his constituents say that is when he emerged as a true leader.
“It was pretty clear to me leading up to that speech that I would not see that criminal justice reform bill become a law because the Democrats had decided to block it,” said Scott of what he called a very painful political moment for him. Rather than wanting substantive reform, he said, Democrats just “wanted the political issue.”
He said he got up that morning, said a lot of prayers, and found himself thinking about the Book of Ezekiel, which talked about the watchman on the wall. If the watchman were to shout that danger was coming, the bloodshed that would follow would not be on his hands.
“I just really wanted to deliver a very simple but important message that the failure of us to act was going to lead to the danger coming,” he said, his voice wavering in a way that makes clear this subject matters deeply to him.
“Unfortunately, since that time, we’ve seen crime explode,” Scott said. “You cannot defund the very responders to bad, difficult, and dangerous situations and not expect the unintended consequence of crime exploding to actually happen.”
As a result, he said, we are seeing more police officers targeted and communities becoming enclaves of hopelessness: “There are very good people living in dangerous neighborhoods who have never been less safe than they are today. And that is on the shoulders and in the hands of people who oppose providing the resources to the officers for those communities.”
This is a race to watch not because it is the rare Senate race between two black candidates (the other being the Georgia race between Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker) or because of how close it will be — instead, watch it because Scott has something to say that is very instructive for where the Republican Party is heading in the future.
