Sen. Tim Scott’s Reply To Biden Exposes Dems’ Jim Crow Past

These days, one can barely finish a first cup of coffee without confronting more accusations of racism in America. Cable news, print and social media, and even congressional proceedings are all now geared toward convincing the nation of its systemic bigotry.

Today, everything is racist. Biden’s congressional address in late April wallowed in assertions of our supposed collective racist ills. Even his recent Infrastructure bill defines highways as racist.

Senator Tim Scott, R-S.C., pushed back on that canard in his bold response to Biden’s congressional snooze-fest, declaring: “America is not a racist country”.  Then began the left’s racist attacks.

Within minutes, progressives on Twitter trended the hashtag “Uncle Tim”, a disturbing moniker dismissing Senator Scott’s remarks because of the color of his skin. Leftwing guests on cable news ridiculed Scott as the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate.  Odd, because the Democrats currently only field two (Booker and Warnock).  In fact, there were no Democrat Senators until 1996.  Republicans have the honor of electing the first in 1870 and several more since. 

Earlier in April, in an effort to again tar Republicans with the racist mantle, Democrats in the Senate held a day-long examination of what they identified as “Jim Crow” laws revisited, specifically those evils underpinning the new Georgia voting statutes. 

Not only are these assertions and countless others simply unsupported by the facts, they grossly misrepresent the history of “Jim Crow” laws and the responsibility of the modern day Democratic Party for this heirloom of their past.

The Republican Party, founded in 1854 as a coalition opposing the extension of slavery into new states and territories, was the seminal political movement ending slavery and racial disparities, bringing the country farther into fully realizing its founding ideal that “all men are created equal”. 

Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, was willing to wage a bloody Civil War to end slavery. That conflict saw the decimation of nearly 700,000 Americans (then 2.5% of the population) to achieve this noble and righteous goal.

In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to declare slaves in the Confederate States free, and willed through a Republican Congress the 13^th Amendment, which abolished slavery under law in America. Later enactment of the 14^th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause guaranteed equal rights for all citizens, especially black Americans.

But winning the Civil War did not end racism. The Democrats, identified with the plantations of the Old South, carried on their discriminatory policies against their former slaves. The southern states established southern segregation, or “Jim Crow”, under a false doctrine of separate but equal, which was later mimicked in the South African policies of Apartheid.

These Southern Segregationists denied blacks the equal rights to vote and to own property. They carried on a long tradition of denying black children the right to equal education. A Confederate Cavalry General, Nathan Bedford Forrest, created the Ku Klux Klan, which endures in the modern Democrat Party (West Virginia Senator and Democratic Party icon Robert Byrd, the long-time “Dean” of the U.S. Senate, was first and foremost an “Exalted Cyclops” of the KKK).

This Democrat southern segregation continued for 100 years after the Civil War and into the battles over civil rights as recently as the 1960s. Southern Segregationists won high ranking positions in the Democrat Party for those decades of resistance, holding such offices as Senate Majority Leader and Vice President, elected under policies of geographic balance for national tickets. Southern Segregationist George Wallace ran for President in 1968 as a Democrat, splitting the Democrat vote to deny Minnesota Democrat and Vice President Hubert Humphrey from election to the White House that year.  

Overwhelming congressional Republican support guaranteed passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In 1960, President John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts ran for President with Southern Segregationist Lyndon Johnson from Texas on his ticket (Johnson later became President when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963). Even when Barack Obama ran for President he selected long time friend of southern segregationists Joe Biden, former Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as his vice president.

Sen. Kamala Harris properly chastised Biden in the Presidential debates for his history of alliance with southern segregationist Democrats. Yet, that didn’t stop her from being chosen by Biden as his vice president or corporate media and elites from playing cover for Joe and the Democratic Party’s ugly past.

Nonetheless, Democrats are keen to rewrite history. Over the last four years, President Trump made major headways into capturing more of the black vote for the GOP. Tim Scott’s brilliant retort to Biden was even more empowering toward that end. That is a trend that must be reversed for the Democrats to have any shot at future survival. To do so, however, Democrats must count on the nation to first disregard American history. 

Lew Uhler is founder and chairman of the National Tax Limitation Committee and the National Tax Limitation Foundation (NTLF). Uhler was a contemporary and collaborator with Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman in California and across the country.

Peter Ferrara served as a member of the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush, and the Dunn Liberty Fellow in Economics at the King’s College in New York.

Joe Yocca is NTLF’s policy director. A long-time political and policy consultant, Joe served in the California State Senate as chief of staff to the Republican leadership for decades, and directed numerous statewide legislative and congressional campaigns throughout his career.