Senator Tim Scott
Jim DeMint, the Republican junior senator from South Carolina, recently announced that he is resigning from the US Senate. He is to take up the position of president of the Heritage Foundation, a very conservative Washington think-tank.
In terms of promoting legislation or making things happen in the Senate, DeMint’s senatorial career has not been an illustrious one. But he is well-known as a founding father of the Tea Party movement and so of the rightwards lurch of the Republican Party that helped it gain control of the House of Representatives in 2010, but ensured its defeat in the presidential election of 2012. His Republican PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, raised and spent $5.48 million in the 2010 and 2012 elections. However in the 27 races in which he was involved, his preferred candidate won only eight times. As a result, some Republican senators see him as largely responsible for the loss of winnable seats in Nevada, Colorado and Delaware in 2010, and in Indiana and Missouri in 2012.
American political commentators are offering different explanations for DeMint’s decision to resign his Senate seat. The most cynical is money. A hugely successful fund-raiser for the causes he supports, his salary as a senator brought him around $174,00 a year; his predecessor as Heritage Foundation president earned $1.1 million. But presumably his motives are not quite so simple as this. His own explanation is this: ‘I’ve decided to join the Heritage Foundation at a time when the conservative movement needs strong leadership in the battle of ideas’. What this means perhaps is that he suspects that the battle of ideas within the congressional Republican Party is being lost by neo-conservatives like him.
In a December 2012, New York Times article, the well-regarded commentator David Brooks listed what he sees as evidence of a new, more pragmatic Republican approach in the current political stand-off over crucial fiscal and budgetary issues. DeMint’s decision to move from the Senate to an organisation ‘known more for ideological purity and fund-raising prowess than for creativity, curiosity or intellectual innovation’, he sees as evidence of Tea Party supporters choosing to ‘self-ghettoise’. And of course it is true that DeMint’s was one of the loudest Republican voices protesting against any kind of cross-party agreement to prevent the US falling over the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ on 1 January. Nonetheless, despite the stubborn opposition of DeMint and his Tea Party colleagues, a deal was finally done between the two parties to prevent that disastrous outcome. At the same time recent speeches by such leading Republicans as Senator Marco Rubio (a possible presidential candidate in 2016) and the Tea Party’s favourite congressman Paul Ryan, at least hint at the emergence of a form of vote-winning ‘compassionate conservatism’ presumably anathema to the extreme right of the party.
So is the post-2012 Republican Party actually moving back towards the conservative centre in American politics? As it happens, the decision over who will replace DeMint in the Senate may help to clarify the answer to this key question. The post-resignation protocol means that the governor of South Carolina – the Republican Nikki Haley – gets to name a temporary successor to DeMint. That person will then be able to contest the seat in the 2014 electoral cycle. A clear front-runner for the position quickly emerged: Tim Scott who was elected in 2010 to the House of Representatives from the Charleston, South Carolina, district.
Remarkably, Scott is the first African-American Republican to represent a South Carolina constituency since 1897. Should he be allocated the vacant Senate seat, he would become the first ever African-American senator from South Carolina, and the first from a southern state since the Reconstruction days of 1881. And he would be the only African-American in the current Senate.
Nominating Scott, the Republican Party would be signalling its readiness to begin to move towards the diversification that most commentators see as essential if the party is ever to broaden its appeal to the range of minorities that increasingly make up the American electorate. On the other hand, if the widely-favoured Scott is passed over, there will be no shortage of voices insisting that the Republican Party has learned nothing from its 2012 defeat, and remains the party only of its traditional white, male, base.
On 2 January 2013, the Republican Party finally made its decision clear: in Washington on that day, Tim Scott assumed office as a Republican senator from South Carolina.
Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University
