Who Is South Carolina’s New Senator?

South Carolina voters will have to imagine what might have been had Gov. Nikki Haley gone with the popular sentiment of the state and picked Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert to succeed the departing Jim DeMint. On Monday, Haley appointed Rep. Tim Scott–who like herself and DeMint is a Republican–to fill the post.

So what kind of senator will Tim Scott be? Very conservative, based on his record in the House of Representatives. The newest member of the Senate is backed by the tea party and wants to kick entire families off of food stamps for supporting unions, give billions in subsidies to the major oil companies and spend taxpayer dollars to display the Ten Commandments on government property. Oh, and let’s not forget he wants to impeach President Obama.

Think Progress has more on Scott’s House record:

Floated impeaching Obama over the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate raged in the summer of 2011 because of the intransigence of Tea Party freshmen like Scott, the nation inched perilously close to defaulting on its obligations. One option discussed by some officials to avoid that scenario was for the president to assert that the debt ceiling itself was an unconstitutional infringement on the 14th Amendment. However, Tim Scott told a South Carolina Tea Party group that if Obama were to go this route, it would be an “impeachable act.”

Proposed a bill to cut off food stamps for entire families if one member went on strike. One of the most anti-union members of Congress, Scott proposed a bill two months after entering Congress in 2011 to kick families off food stamps if one adult were participating in a strike. Scott’s legislation made no exception for children or other dependents.

Wanted to spend an unlimited amount of money to display Ten Commandments outside county building. When Scott was on the Charleston County Council, one of his primary issues was displaying the Ten Commandments outside the Council building. According to the Augusta Chronicle, Scott said the display “would remind council members and speakers the moral absolutes they should follow.” When he was sued for violating the Constitution and a Circuit Judge’s orders, Scott was nonplussed: “Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal (of displaying the Commandments) is worth it.”

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— Posted by Tracy Bloom.