Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., doubled down this weekend on his opposition to federal district court nominee Thomas Farr, without doing a single thing to beef up his extraordinarily vague and baffling explanation for doing so. His vagueness reinforces the idea that Scott is trafficking in smears without substance, and that he doesn’t care whether those smears harm the reputation of a lawyer of great competence and character.
Scott’s re-manning of his own barricade against reasoned discourse came in a letter to the editor published on Saturday in the Wall Street Journal, complaining about the Journal’s editorial that criticized his stance on Farr. Scott wrote that “we should stop bringing candidates with questionable track records on race before the full Senate for a vote.” Nowhere in the letter did he identify a single example of Farr truly having a “questionable track record on race.”
