Artis Scott was born some half a century after the culmination of the Civil War, forced to leave the third grade to subsist on picking cotton. His grandson is one of 10 black Americans to ever serve in the Senate and the only one to ever serve in both chambers of Congress.
Unlike the woke white folks cheering on our cities burning to the ground in the name of America’s original and unimpeachable sin of slavery, Tim Scott believes in the American Dream because he epitomizes it. After months of equivocation from both sides of the political aisle about the American promise, Scott beamed on the opening night of the Republican National Convention, with a powerful oration not just on the chilling social forces designed to guilt the nation into believing we cannot be better than our worst moments, but also on his own personal reasons for those convictions.
“After starting my business and spending time in local government, I ran for Congress in 2010,” the South Carolina senator said. “The district is based in Charleston, South Carolina, where the Civil War started, against a son of our legendary senator, Strom Thurmond. You may be asking yourself, how does a poor black kid from a single-parent household run and win in a race crowded with Republicans, against a Thurmond? Because of the evolution of the heart, in an overwhelmingly white district, the voters judged me on the content of my character, not the color of my skin.”
Scott, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s opportunity zones and other key aspects of the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, is no moral equivocator. He pushed back as hard on cancel culture and the absurd notion “that things are worse today than in the 1860s or the 1960s” as much as he elevated the monumental and diverse gains of Trump’s pro-business administration.
“We put hard-earned tax dollars back in people’s pockets by cutting their taxes, especially for single-parent households like the one I grew up in, cutting single mothers’ taxes 70% on average,” Scott said. “President Trump supported these tax cuts for those single moms and other working families and signed these policies into law, and our nation is better off for it.”
It’s easy to write off Trump when focusing on his callous tweets and racially inflammatory rhetoric. It’s far harder when listening to the cold, hard economic evidence of his administration’s gains for those who need it the most — and especially when delivered by a man who has a horse in every race. And, most poignantly, Scott made the affirmative case to reject tossing a vote to the party that demands it as its right:
Joe Biden also failed our nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, heaping blame on them as they fought to ensure our young folks had access to higher education. Once again, to clean up Joe Biden’s mess, President Trump signed into law historically high funding for HBCUs, as well as a bill to give them permanent funding for the first time ever!
And now, Joe Biden wants to come for your pocketbooks. Unless of course, you’re a blue state millionaire. I’m serious! That’s one of their solutions for the pandemic. They want to take more money from your pocket going to help Manhattan elites and Hollywood moguls get a tax break. Republicans, however, passed President Trump’s once-in-a-generation tax reform bill that lowered taxes for single moms, working families and those in need.
So, when it comes to what Joe Biden says he’ll do, look at his actions. Look at his policies. Look at what he already did and what he didn’t do while he’s been in Washington for 47 years.
The Tim Scotts of the world don’t need moral cases for capitalism or moral defenses of America’s past. They’re already living proof of what they mean for progress today.
