Fox News’s Trey Gowdy admonished MSNBC’s Joy Reid for saying Sen. Tim Scott provides the Republican Party with a “patina of diversity.”
“Tim Scott is too good of a person to respond to the likes of Joy Reid, but I am not,” Gowdy said on Fox News Primetime Monday night. “He can stand wherever the hell he wants to stand … because he’s earned the right to be there.
“For a party and a media that claim to love civility and public discourse, and rooting out the hot political rhetoric and finding some unity, she has a really weird way of showing it.”
Gowdy was responding to a comment Reid made last week while discussing Scott’s participation in a GOP effort opposing a $15 minimum wage increase as part of the latest coronavirus package.
SENATE DEMOCRATS HELP BLOCK $15 MINIMUM WAGE FROM $1.9 TRILLION SPENDING BILL
“You’ve got to love Tim Scott standing there to provide the patina of diversity over that round of words, that basket full of words,” Reid said.
Gowdy continued, if Reid “knew anything about Tim Scott, she would understand full well why he would be participating in a press conference on the minimum wage. If she knew anything about Tim Scott, she would understand why he is frequently front and center in major policy debates in Washington.”
Scott “made himself an expert on the issue. … He was a business owner. He started a business. He had to make payroll. He had to access credit. Tim Scott was at the forefront on tax reform because he’s on the Senate Finance Committee … because he dedicated himself to becoming an expert.”
Scott’s press secretary Caroline Anderegg also slammed Reid for the comment, tweeting that the South Carolina senator “is not a prop, Joy.”
“Unsurprising someone like Joy would stoop that low—I guess that’s what you do in the absence of a substantive policy critique,” Anderegg added. “The senator has been leading the fight against the misguided Dem wage hike for weeks.”
Unsurprising someone like Joy would stoop that low—I guess that’s what you do in the absence of a substantive policy critique.
The senator has been leading the fight against the misguided Dem wage hike for weeks.
Here’s what he actually had to say at that presser ? pic.twitter.com/Jypq7W7XHG
— Caroline Anderegg (@cfanderegg) March 2, 2021
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Efforts to raise the federal minimum wage have so far failed, but some Democrats vowed to continue their efforts.
“If anybody thinks that we’re giving up on this issue, they are sorely mistaken,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said Friday. “If we have to vote on it time and time again, we will, and we’re going to succeed. The American people understand that we cannot continue to have millions of people working for starvation wages.”
