Scott’s tough talk on China on the presidential campaign trail doesn’t match up with his actual record in the Senate of “watering down” U.S.-China legislation. A new report from Politico highlights how Scott has repeatedly used his perch on the Senate Banking Committee to put Wall Street above America’s national security interests.
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Politico: Tim Scott’s Senate record doesn’t match his tough talk on China
- Since taking the top Republican slot on the powerful Senate Banking Committee this year, the South Carolina lawmaker has been one of the biggest roadblocks to new rules restricting U.S.-China trade — everything from TikTok bans to reviews of high-tech investment.
- Scott has “only been willing to support new China policies if there’s very little cost, effectively saying that it isn’t worth it to stand up to China,” said Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and a former member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
- While many China hawks hoped he would be more open to cracking down on Beijing than past GOP leaders on the committee, who were close to Wall Street, they have been disappointed.
- In recent months, Scott has used his Banking Committee perch to water down bipartisan Senate legislation that would have allowed the federal government to block deals with Chinese tech companies that presented national security risks. Now, that measure requires only that U.S. firms notify the government when they make those investments. That change was demanded by Scott during negotiations to add the measure to the annual defense authorization bill, according to four officials on Capitol Hill and K Street with knowledge of the talks.
- But national security hawks also question some of Scott’s other China policies, including legislation he has drafted on TikTok, the Chinese social media behemoth, whose ties to the CCP and massive stores of user data has raised concerns across the West. Unlike his presidential rivals, Scott does not support banning the wildly popular app in the United States; his bill would only require app stores to display a notification if an app is Chinese-owned. That stance, and Scott’s longtime connections to Oracle founder Larry Ellison, whose firm hosts TikTok user data in the U.S., have already sparked backlash in conservative media.
- The hawks see a pattern in Scott’s positions: They reflect the China priorities of Wall Street, which broadly opposes new rules that would restrict American trade and investment in China and other nations.
- Scott has long been a beneficiary of financial sector contributions, with firms like investment bank Goldman Sachs and private equity firm Apollo Global Management among the top contributors to his past Senate campaign, according to the campaign finance tracking site Open Secrets.
