SC African-American Congressman Tim Scott is apparently the favorite to be appointed to succeed the retiring Sen Jim DeMint. Does Tim Scott deviate on any major issues (or ANY issues) from GOP orthodoxy, or is (and will) Scott's voting record essentially identical to how the late NC racist Jesse Helms would vote?
[Jesse Helms voted for racist third party candidate George Corley Wallace in the 1968 presidential race - Nixon vs. Humphrey vs. Wallace. Helms also proclaimed in 1954 when the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in schools that it was time for states to support religious and private schools with tax dollars, not public schools. "Unless our Negro citizens submit more easily than we predict they will, North Carolina does not have the simple choice between segregated schools and integrated schools. Our only choice is between integrated public schools and free-choice private schools." Helms supported closing public schools rather than follow court orders to integrate them. He also supported state tuition vouchers to parents so they could send their children to private, all-white schools instead of to integrated schools. Helms' support for tuition vouchers later became Republican Party platform policy, supported unanimously by today's GOP. Helms convinced Pres Reagan in 1983 to name Tom Ellis, Helms' longest and closest advisor, the man who convinced Helms to run for public office (in 1970), to the Board for International Broadcasting. At his confirmation hearing, then Sen. Joe Biden and MA Sen. Paul Tsongas established that Ellis was a racist (and called him that on the record at the hearing). Ellis had been a director of a fund that sponsored "scientific research" to show that blacks are genetically inferior to whites; Ellis authored a handbill in the 1976 Reagan - Ford GOP Pres primary campaign in NC that claimed Ford "favored a black for Vice President"; Ellis as legal counsel to the NC Advisory Commission on Education authored a memo that stated: "The eventual goal of this movement to integrate public schools is racial intermarriage and the disappearance of the Negro race by fusing into the white."; Ellis (along with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation as members of the "Council on National Policy" supported the white racist government in South Africa (as did Helms). [See Hard Right The Rise of Jesse Helms, 1986, by Ernest B. Ferguson.]
Congressional Republicans are trying to name the historic federal building in Raleigh, NC in honor of the racist Jesse Helms!! See H.R. 6607 by Rep. Renee Ellmers. It is presently before Congress. I am surprised that no one in the House or Senate - not even Sens. Sanders, Harkin, Franken, Cardin or others - is challenging the naming of a federal building after the racist Jesse Helms.
When Scott ran for Congress in a tough GOP primary he promised the voters he would serve no more than 4 terms, 8 years. Let's see if greed for power changes his opinion on the wisdom of term limits if he actually gets to the Senate.