In any crowded primary field, candidates will inevitably look for ways to stand out amongst their competitors. When nearly all of a field’s contenders broadly agree on the major issues of the day, that can be challenging, pushing candidates to get creative.
Sen. Tim Scott, for example, is currently having a tough time in the Republican presidential race — most national polling shows him with support below 4% — but the South Carolinian seems to believe his criticisms of Attorney General Merrick Garland will help set him apart.
During Wednesday night’s debate, for example, the senator declared, “When I’m president, the first thing I’ll do is fire Merrick Garland.” The next day, Scott’s political operation sent out a fundraising pitch echoing the line, vowing to fire Garland “on day 1.”
As campaign promises go, this is a little odd. Garland is, after all, a political appointee. A Democratic president — in this case, Joe Biden — took office in 2021 and chose officials for his White House cabinet, tapping the attorney general to lead the Department of Justice. Biden didn’t have to fire Donald Trump’s cabinet secretaries because they’d already left: In nearly every instance, new presidents, especially those replacing a successor from a different party, replace old political appointees with new ones. It’s just how the process works.
If Biden were to lose his re-election bid in 2024, there’d be no reason for the new Republican president to put firing Garland at the top of his or her to-do list, because the attorney general wouldn’t still be in office on Inauguration Day. Scott, who’s been in Congress for more than 12 years, almost certainly knows this.
Making matters worse is why, exactly, the senator is so eager to oust the attorney general.
“We keep seeing not only the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political opponents but also against parents who show up at school board meetings,” the Republican senator said at this week’s debate. “They are called, under this DOJ, ‘domestic terrorists.’”
It’s unfortunate that this false claim lingers, and its repetition doesn’t make it any less wrong. As USA Today explained:
This is false and mischaracterizes an exchange starting with a September 2021 letter written to Attorney General Merrick Garland by an education group asking the federal government to help with threats of violence against school officials. The letter from the National School Boards Association claimed that some of those threats “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.” The group later apologized for its word choice. Garland did not use that phrase in his response. Instead, he discussed the increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school officials and directed the FBI to meet with leaders across the country to talk about ways to deal with those threats.
As for the senator’s insistence that Americans “keep seeing … the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political opponents,” there’s still literally zero evidence to support Scott’s claim. Even Alberto Gonzales, George W. Bush’s former attorney general, has urged Republicans to stop pushing the line, and Bill Barr, Donald Trump’s former attorney general, has tried to remind his party that it’s Trump who actually wants to weaponize federal law enforcement.
Does the senator want to stand out in the GOP crowd? Yes. Is this a sensible way to achieve his goal? No.
