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Who is Tim Scott? Only Black GOP Senator to respond to Joe Biden once said 'I don’t blame Trump' for Capitol riots

'I think it should be a surprise to everybody,' Scott said when asked about the issues he is going to discuss with POTUS

After President Joe Biden addresses his first joint session of Congress on Wednesday, April 28 evening, the task of giving the rebuttal to the POTUS, will fall to Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. Scott, 55, is the junior senator from South Carolina and a rising star in the GOP is the only Black Republican senator. He has spent a decade in Congress representing South Carolina and has focused on issues like police reform and opportunity zones. 

The speech will offer Scott a platform where he has a chance to speak to many Americans for perhaps the first time at a moment in which he is playing a critical role in the effort to bring together a policing bill that can pass the narrowly divided US Senate.

While he kept many details of his speech to himself, the South Carolina Republican said he's done "an appropriate level of practice." "You do your homework and you do your best to ... anticipate what he's going to say and be in a position to share with the nation a different way, at least what I think is a better way," Scott said on Tuesday, April 27. “You figure out who your audience is, you figure out what you want to say and you try and find a way to say it well,” Scott added about his speech preparations.

“And you lean into who you are.” Scott didn't elaborate on which issues he plans to address or if he would be discussing the effort to overhaul policing. "I think it should be a surprise to everybody," he said of his speech, but, as a well-known fan of colorful socks, he did divulge that he had bought a new pair especially for the occasion.

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Who is Tim Scott?

Scott, who hails from North Charleston, South Carolina, nearly dropped out of high school. His life turned around when he befriended a businessman who became a mentor and stressed the value of hard work. After completing his graduation, he entered the insurance and real estate businesses and was elected to the Charleston County Council. He was a co-chairman of the 1996 reelection campaign of Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., an overt segregationist decades earlier.

When Scott was elected to the House in 2010, his closest GOP primary rival was Thurmond’s son Paul.

Governor Nikki Haley appointed Scott to the Senate in 2013 when former Sen Jim DeMint stepped down to run the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. This appointment made Scott the first Black senator to represent a Southern state since the Reconstruction era following the Civil War. Scott then won a 2014 special election for his Senate seat and was reelected in 2016. 

Before entering politics, Scott ran an insurance agency, which he still owns. He sits on the Senate Finance Committee, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs and three others.

Scott and his brothers were raised by his mother, Frances Scott, in Charleston, SC. "To every kid growing up in poverty wondering if fitting in means dumbing down, the answer is no," Scott told The Post and Courier in a profile of the senator and his mother. "To every single mom who struggles to make ends meet, who wonders if her efforts are in vain, they are not."

Political analysts have been tossing around the idea of a 2024 Republican presidential run by Scott, 55. "Best person in all of politics," former South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy wrote on Twitter in 2020. "Incredible story of hope and perseverance. He'd make an amazing POTUS one day."

Scott has remained a party loyalist who seldom makes waves and, like many Republicans, often avoided publicly criticizing Donald Trump. Scott voted against removing Trump from office after the former president was impeached for igniting the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, saying later, “The one person I don’t blame is President Trump.” 

Scott, among only 11 Black senators in history, has also previously detailed his own distressing encounters with the law. He’s described being pulled over 18 times while driving since 2000 and being stopped by a US Capitol security officer who didn’t recognize him as recently as 2019, even though Scott was wearing a senator’s lapel pin. “While I thank God I have not endured bodily harm, I have, however, felt the pressure applied by the scales of justice when they are slanted,” he said during a 2016 Senate speech. “I have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness and the humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself.”