Republican rebuttal to Biden warns against 'socialist dreams'
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[April 29, 2021]
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -After President Joe
Biden laid out his aims to reshape the U.S. economy and address racial
injustice on Wednesday, Republican Senator Tim Scott argued that the
Democratic agenda would divide Americans, lower wages and shrink the
U.S. economy.
A rising star in his party and the sole Black Republican in the Senate,
Scott said Democrats have no interest in working with Republicans on
infrastructure legislation and rejected Biden's American Families Plan
as a scheme to put Washington at the center of American life "from the
cradle to college."
Biden spent parts of his first speech to Congress reaching out to
Republicans. He thanked Senate Republicans for proposing an alternative
to his $2.3 trillion infrastructure package and welcomed their aid in
addressing the U.S. epidemic of gun violence.
He also fist-bumped House Republican Liz Cheney -- a vocal critic of
Biden's predecessor, President Donald Trump -- and made friendly
references to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
"Our president seems like a good man. He speech was full of good words,"
Scott said in the nationally televised Republican rebuttal to Biden's
address.
"But our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes," he added.
"Our best future will not come from Washington schemes or socialist
dreams."
The South Carolina Republican credited Trump's Operation Warp Speed for
the success of the vaccine rollout and attributed the economic recovery
to last year's Republican-supported COVID-19 relief.
"This administration inherited a tide that had already turned," Scott
said.
A week after a jury convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek
Chauvin of murdering George Floyd, a handcuffed Black man, Biden called
on Congress to pass police reform legislation by next month's
anniversary of Floyd's death.
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In his rebuttal to President Joe Biden's address to Congress, Sen.
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, discussed on
Wednesday the racial progress the United States has made.
Scott, 55, a leading figure in renewed congressional
talks on police reform legislation, warned against using race as a
political weapon and defended a new Republican state voting law in
Georgia that Biden and other Democrats have denounced as a return to
Jim Crow segregation.
"Hear me clearly. America is not a racist country," Scott declared.
He said Democratic attacks on Republican state voting laws are a
pretext to win support for a Biden-backed democracy bill that
Democrats say would strengthen access to the ballot box but
Republicans claim would allow a federal takeover of elections.
"This is not about civil rights or our racial past. It's about
rigging elections in the future," Scott said in a comment that
appeared to evoke Trump's false claims that the 2020 presidential
election was stolen from him.
His was not the only speech responding to Biden. Unusually,
progressive Democrats tapped Representative Jamaal Bowman to deliver
their own address afterward.
Bowman, who is also Black, took a sharply different tone: "The
proposals that President Biden has put forward over the last few
weeks would represent important steps - but don't go as big as we'd
truly need," he said.
(Reporting by David Morgan, additional reporting by Susan Cornwell;
Editing by Scott Malone, Peter Cooney and Richard Pullin)
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