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.”
The sole specific concern Scott has ever offered about Farr involved a memo written in 1991 about a controversial mailer in a 1990 Senate race — and, as Scott publicly acknowledged, the memo showed that Farr advised against any such mailer. Moreover, Scott said that even a number of Obama appointees vouched for Farr’s character.
Yet somehow Scott suddenly decided that those factors he himself said worked in favor of Farr now amount to “a questionable track record.” This is akin to deciding that somebody accused of a crime has a “questionable record” even after DNA evidence definitively absolves them of the crime.
Does Scott not understand the damage this does to a man’s reputation? Does he not understand that for a lawyer to submit to such a probing inquiry into all facets of one’s life and professional career, only to be blocked at the last minute, is to harm not just the nominee’s social standing but livelihood in a permanent way? Does he even care?
Farr certainly will be re-nominated in January, when Republicans will enjoy a 53-47 majority instead of the present 51-49 edge. The concern, though, is that if Scott, the lone black Republican in the Senate, keeps trafficking in smears that are not just unsubstantiated but utterly unspecified (other than that they somehow involve issues of race), then several other nervous Republicans might be afraid to support Farr because of the racialist connotations of the vote. In effect, Scott would be playing the “race card” against his own Republican colleagues.
Any time, then, that leftist activists bandy a charge of “racial insensitivity” against a Republican nominee, will Scott decide that the mere accusation automatically should kill the nomination? And will some of his colleagues continue to fall in line?
At some point, a backlash usually comes against those who falsely stir the racial pot. Scott’s Republican colleagues should be just as worried about their voters who resent such race-baiting as they are about the media that will support any outlandish accusation from the Left.
If there is evidence against Farr, by all means air it, in order to justify the idea that he should not serve on the bench. Racism is an evil that must absolutely always be fought against, 100 percent of the time. But if all that exists are rumors and innuendos, rumors contradicted by the evidence and rejected by the American Bar Association, then a senator who traffics in the rumors is acting shamefully.
Scott should provide specifics, or get out of the way.
