Tim Scott’s Anti-Constitutional Disingenuity

Tim Scott recently had the audacity to respond to me with a form email claiming, “the current state of illegal immigration presents significant challenges to our national security.”

A review of press releases on his website, scott.senate.gov, reveals no such concern for our national security. March 12 is a release about launching a Republican reform to the CDC.  As for the Signalgate scandal, not a single word about Pete Hegseth leaking classified military data on March 15, in two separate group chats. March 17 is a release about highlighting “historic ten-week voting streak in Senate.”

So Scott had posted nothing about national security since December 18, 2024, when he posted a photo of himself shaking hands with Hegseth and claiming that they “share similar concerns about our nation’s security and the direction our military is headed.”

However, when he published his Week in Review newsletter on March 15, his hypocrisy was on full display as he quoted Proverbs, then called himself a champion of “serious, bipartisan solutions” on the banking committee, including eliminating “all references to reputational risk as a measure to determine the safety and soundness of regulated financial institutions” (the FIRM Act), and then his gaslighting tour de force: a social media post about Mahmoud Khalil in which he states, “Yet again, Democrats choose to defend pro-terrorist, antisemitic foreign nationals over the safety and interests of the American people.”

It never ceases to amaze me how someone whose blind insistence that the Second Amendment is a blanket to cover even the most irresponsible forms of gun ownership, despite the proven danger to the population, would understand the concept that we have to allow for a certain amount of risk in order to maintain our constitutional freedom. Too bad Scott’s interpretation only applies to voting against the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (which even Lindsey Graham supported), as well as the 2013 acts to prohibit the sale of assault weapons and place limits on firearm magazine capacity.

But when it comes to denying due process, he is okay with it because of those he calls “dangerous and illegal migrants,” though the Justice Department admitted in court that the deportation of at least one of these migrants was unlawful. Does he think we are too stupid to understand that certain risks must be borne in order to preserve freedom? Or to know that immigrant labor, illegal or otherwise, is the backbone of our failing economy (which Trump is doing his best to further decimate)? Or to read the census reports that our population growth continues to decline, and that economists across the board agree that immigration is essential to providing the workforce necessary for economic success?

But no, Scott continues to support an administration whose solution to concerns about the declining birth rate is to pay women $5,000 to have babies. Never mind that we can’t get Congress to pass paid family leave or expanded child tax credit. Never mind that Scott voted for a budget that would gut Medicaid, SNAP, and other family support programs while cutting taxes for the ultra-rich. Never mind that, in 2024, he called Biden’s state of the union address “socialism at its finest.”

Never mind that he supports cutting Biden-era increased IRS funds that would enable hiring more IRS agents, in order to collect $1.1 billion from known, but unpaid, 2024 taxes owed by corporations and the uber wealthy. Never mind that he defended DOGE’s rifling through American’s most sensitive data and mistakenly firing essential government workers left and right because “every single dollar spent by the government is a dollar not spent by the private sector.”  Never mind that a 2024 report by the Department of Justice found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes!

The solutions to actual problems America is facing are staring Scott in the face. He can say all he likes in his form letters that “I remain deeply committed to upholding the Constitution, ensuring that we preserve the principles of checks and balances that are vital to the functioning of our democracy,” but it’s clear he’d rather support the Trump administration in making up imaginary problems than solve anything at all.