Horowitz: Tim Scott has already disqualified himself by choosing ‘grievance over greatness’

The difference between Democrats’ identity grievance politics and Republican’s identity pandering is that the former shamelessly promote it while the later express some shame, but proceed to do it anyway. Evidently, the South Carolina GOP is in no short supply of identity grievance grifting.

When Nikki Haley announced her vanity run for president, she contended that “this is not about identity politics,” but then went on to assert, “I don’t believe in glass ceilings either” and quipped, “May the best woman win.” She rarely goes a day without reminding people that she is a “woman of color.” Her favorite cringeworthy and pointless trope is “I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants, not black, not white. I was different.”

Now we have another South Carolina presidential candidate, the second bachelor senator from the Palmetto State, running on the same forked-tongued relationship with identity politics. He rhetorically asked his audience if they want “grievance over greatness,” as if he is running to end identity politics. The problem is his entire career is built upon normalizing a subtle degree of identity grievance politics on the right that validates Democrat talking points.

For years, Tim Scott has indulged the fallacious premise that black people are over-incarcerated and has worked studiously with Senator Cory Booker on jailbreak legislation he calls “police reform.” But what is perhaps less known but much more disqualifying is that he led the fight to tank one of Trump’s best judicial nominees and, in doing so, engaged in the worst sort of cancel culture powered by identity politics.

On September 7, 2017, President Trump nominated federal prosecutor Ryan Bounds to a vacant Oregon seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Unlike many GOP judicial nominees who have “clean,” PC writings that often reveal a milquetoast pick, Bounds wrote papers in college criticizing the divisive nature of identity factions on campus. Bounds, even at a young age, actually perfectly articulated a view that many conservatives hold — that an obsession with dividing people into factions is not only superfluous but harmful to our common cause as Americans. Bounds contended that the “existence of ethnic organizations is no inevitable prerequisite to maintaining a diverse community — white students, after all, seem to be doing all right without an Aryan Student Union.”

Democrats screamed bloody murder about Bounds during his confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee. But because Republicans controlled the majority, he appeared headed to an easy confirmation, albeit along a party line vote. In comes Senator Scott at the last minute, without any warning to the president or majority leader, and shared this information with Senator Rubio, who also feigned outrage. At the last minute, they both agreed to virtue-signal and walk into the devastating identity politics trap of the left and oppose the nomination. The White House, in turn, withdrew his nomination.

This action is simply disqualifying for any office, much less the presidency. Identity politics is not incidental to the political arena. It is the lead ship in the woke armada. Leftists know that crying “Racist!” is the surest way to pick the GOP’s political lock and get Republicans to acquiesce to every policy they desire. Whether it’s the rainbow jihad, crime, immigration, or economic policy, the left has enmeshed racial politics into all key arguments and employs a truculent group of agitators to blackmail Republicans into surrender.

Moreover, the difference between nominating someone like Scott and nominating a real conservative is the difference between placing more Brett Kavanaughs on the federal courts and placing more Clarence Thomases. The reason most GOP nominees, although superior to Democrats, are often reluctant to buck the orthodoxy of the corrupt legal system is because of identity politics. Most contrived rights are backfilled into the 14th Amendment in a way that hitches a ride off the original civil rights movement. Few have the guts to suggest that our entire 14^th Amendment jurisprudence is a legal fiction, as Thomas so often and boldly asserts.

How can we be certain a nominee is willing to buck the system? Well, 99 times out of 100, if he does not have writings similar to those of Ryan Bounds, that individual will not be an all-star. With Tim Scott as president, it will be abundantly clear that all the strongest candidates will be persona non grata. After all, how can you fight racial grievances when you believe in them? Scott himself has whined in public about supposedly being pulled over by police because of his race in comments reminiscent of Michelle Obama. When he's not virtue-signaling about Ukraine, he’s signaling his virtue about “de-escalation training” for police.

Indeed, there is nothing refreshing about Tim Scott. He follows the same failed playbook of McConnell’s GOP under which we’ve been suffering for two generations. The only thing worse than Democrat identity politics is Republican identity politics. The fact that Scott happens to be black doesn’t make that any better.