Sen. Tim Scott said liberals flooded his inbox with hateful messages following his fiery speech on the stalled passage of his police reform legislation in the Senate.
The South Carolina Republican, who is the only black GOP senator, called it a “crying shame” that the average person wouldn’t benefit from a bill that has large bipartisan elements because of minor disagreements. He said he received several messages in his office following his speech on the Senate floor.
“We had more than a dozen of them, I only played two of them, which were the most racially offensive comments from liberals in this country that called to say that I was in their crosshairs,” Scott said on Fox News’s The Story with Martha MacCallum. “It was so profanity-laced, you can’t play five seconds of those videos on your show because there’s that many F-bombs, the N-word, by liberal Democrats causing a stir in my office and threatening my life. It is the most audacious, repugnant behavior I’ve seen in a very long time.”
Scott’s bill was blocked by Democrats believing it didn’t go far enough to address the issues in policing and law enforcement’s relationship with black communities. House Democrats introduced a separate bill that is expected to be rejected by the GOP-controlled Senate.
The Republican and Democratic bills both support a version of a ban on chokeholds and efforts to better the relationship between police departments and black people. Democrats are also seeking to remove the legal protection of qualified immunity for police and make it easier for citizens to seek damages if they feel their constitutional rights were infringed by police. Republicans oppose that measure.
Police reform efforts were sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Scott also said protests aimed against police and attempts to remove historical figures deemed as racist are not based on historical understanding.
“The uneducated are showing up in droves, and unfortunately, they are getting microphones,” Scott said. “It’s chaos, and chaos leads to anarchy, and that’s dangerous. Very dangerous for this nation.”
