U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), who initially ran against former President Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and then dropped his bid to campaign for Trump, continues to stump hard for the Republican nominee and attack the Democrats.
That has meant shifting gears from mostly attacking President Joe Biden to aiming at Vice President Kamala Harris, the new presumptive Democratic nominee.
Scott and Harris have a history, which became a fresh wedge after Harris commented on the death of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman who called 911 and was murdered by an Illinois deputy (a 30-year-old white man) in her Chicago home.
Harris wrote: “Sonya Massey deserved to be safe. The disturbing footage released yesterday confirms what we know from the lived experiences of so many — we have much work to do to ensure that our justice system fully lives up to its name. President Biden and I call on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that I coauthored in the Senate. We must come together to achieve meaningful reforms that advance the safety of all communities.”
You mean the bill you walked away from when it didn’t fit your politics?
— Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) July 24, 2024
Even if you didn’t take your ball and go home, federal law does nothing here. Illinois must step up. This is murder & the officers should be held accountable to the full extent of the law. https://t.co/VfRm5sw3Ta
Scott responded to Harris’s post by writing: “You mean the bill you walked away from when it didn’t fit your politics? Even if you didn’t take your ball and go home, federal law does nothing here. Illinois must step up. This is murder & the officers should be held accountable to the full extent of the law.”
Q: What went wrong with the police reform bill?@CoryBooker: "We made tremendous progress…But it turned out that my Republican negotiating partner [Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.)] was not willing to embrace so much of the change that we had agreed upon." pic.twitter.com/F8FvQJf6Z8
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) October 1, 2021
Scott is being called out for hypocrisy. As the X account “Wiseguy” replied: “Seriously? You of all people are going to talk about walking away from police reform bills!”
In the Summer of 2020, following the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Scott and U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) started to negotiate a bipartisan police reform bill.
When asked about its progress in October 2021, during an interview with Mother Jones, Booker reported:
“We made tremendous progress…But it turned out that my Republican negotiating partner [Scott] was not willing to embrace so much of the change that we had agreed upon.”
Seriously? You of all people are going to talk about walking away from police reform bills! Do you think we all have goldfish memories? https://t.co/DKZIwNP1BB
— Wiseguy (@xwiseguyx) July 25, 2024
Scott told Face the Nation that he didn’t agree to the bill because he claimed Democrats wanted to “defund the police.”
Note: The bipartisan bill — which tied federal grant money to departments’ adoption of reforms — also called for increases in funding for police for mental health initiatives and training.
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