Senator Tim Scott jumps into the Republican presidential primary

South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott filed paperwork Friday morning to enter the 2024 presidential race, formalizing a campaign that has been in the works for months.

Scott faces a tough campaign for the Republican presidential nomination against fellow South Carolina native Nikki Haley and former President Donald Trump.

Despite criminal investigations into his hoarding of public records and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Trump remains a formidable Republican primary candidate, leading widely in many polls.

Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, is less well known than Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another Republican who has laid the groundwork for a presidential campaign.

This presidential candidacy is not a surprise. Last year Scott published a book titled “America, a story of redemption”, fulfilling the informal requirement that all candidates for national office be published authors.

As a senator, Scott emerged as the leading Republican voice on police reform after the 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality.

Republican leaders delegated to Scott the task of negotiating with the Democrats some kind of compromise on higher standards for law enforcement. The two sides failed to reach an agreement, however, as Scott rejected Democratic demands to increase police accountability by reforming “qualified immunity,” the legal doctrine that protects government employees from having to pay damages. for misconduct. (It’s unclear how many other Republicans would have been willing to reform qualified immunity even if Scott had.)

After the high-profile police killing of Tire Nichols earlier this year, Scott said Democrats’ preferred bill, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, was still a “major.”

“I have been working to find common ground solutions that actually have a chance to happen,” Scott he said on Twitter in February. “Solutions to increase funding and training to ensure only the best wear the badge. Solutions that would have made a difference in places like Memphis and Kenosha.”

It is striking that despite apparent agreement that police departments across the country could benefit from higher standards, lawmakers were unable to reach even a modest compromise, unlike bipartisan negotiators who reached agreement on the gun reform last year after high-profile mass shootings. .

Some lawmakers make up for a poor record of legislative achievement with bombastic rhetoric, but not Scott, who avoids inflammatory statements and maintains a mild disposition, often refusing to speak to reporters in the halls of the Capitol.

“I really don’t like theatrics,” Scott said on the Senate floor in 2020 during a speech lamenting that Democrats did not support his police reform proposals. “I don’t run to the microphones.”

Scott offered a reason for his relatively calm demeanor: “Why say what everyone else says?”