BRETT: Tim Scott gave the response last night to the president’s address there to the joint session of Congress, and Tim Scott — who happens to be, full disclosure, my senator. He is the senator that represents me along with the other senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham. He took some major incoming from people at the Washington Post who are essentially trying to say that the story of his life and his family’s hardship isn’t as authentic as would be expected.

In fact, in The Hill newspaper, “Commentators Blast Washington Post Fact Check on Tim Scott — An extensive Washington Post fact check into the background of Sen. Tim Scott (SC), the only Black Republican in the Senate, has drawn fire from critics on the right and the left, with some saying it deliberately downplays the hardship Scott’s family faced after the Civil War. … The story’s headline stated ‘Tim Scott often talks about his grandfather and cotton. There’s more to that tale.'”

Here’s Tim Scott speaking eloquently on why America is not a racist country.

SCOTT: Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country. It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination, and it’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.

BRETT: After the senator made that statement as part of his response to the president’s speech last night — after he made that address — former Obama green jobs czar and CNN commentator Van Jones said this.

JONES: He lost a lot of African-Americans by the tens of millions when he said, “America is not a racist nation.” Look, you can say that we’re getting better, you can say that we have — we’ve come a long way. But when you look at these numbers, when you look at these statistics, it is very clear that this country is still struggling with racism.

BRETT: “Struggling with racism,” but is it “a racist country”? No, Van, it is the Democrats who are losing African-Americans every day, not Tim Scott. You were one for a while. Remember, when you praised President Trump for his criminal justice reform? Let’s go back to last October to hear that.

JONES: Donald Trump… I get beat up by liberals every time I say it and I’m gonna keep saying it. He has done good stuff for the black community — opportunity zone stuff, black college stuff. I worked with him on criminal justice stuff. I saw Donald Trump had African-American people formerly incarcerated in the White House, embrace them, treated them well. There’s a side to Donald Trump that I think he does not get enough credit for.

BRETT: Wow. A moment of truth and clarity. Rush talked about this very challenge: Racist Democrats smearing Tim Scott for doing the job they won’t do.

RUSH: Tim Scott, Republican, South Carolina, got very serious after the George Floyd death, the resulting civil unrest, the war on cops. And he attempted to do what everybody in Washington tells us we must do. He attempted to cross the aisle. He attempted to come up with legislation that both parties could support, for the good of the country, for the good of the people, to satisfy everybody, to deal with legitimate problems so that they would not happen again.

He proposed legislation to fix blue state, Democrat-run cities’ police departments. What’d the Democrats do? They insulted him, and they blocked the bill. After demanding pretty much everything he put in the bill, they blocked it, because it’s an election year, and they cannot possibly have a Republican, African-American Republican anywhere near a solution to this, because they don’t want a solution. They don’t want the idea that cops kill black perps solved. They want the issue.

So they had Senator Durbin go out there on the floor of the Senate and refer to this as a token piece of legislation. Tim Scott is the only African-American Republican senator. And there’s Durbin purposely calling his legislation “token” like it’s insignificant. He knew what he was doing. He was calling Senator Scott a token.

And Senator Scott responded on the floor of the Senate by talking about how that literally hurt him to his soul. To be called a token by a fellow United States senator. So the Democrats insult him, they block the bill, and that’s how to look at this. Democrat-run cities lead the news most every day — riots, looting, statue defacement, destruction, boarded-up stores, the police under assault, police departments defunded.

If there was a real news media, Democrats would be losing by historic, landslide numbers in every poll. Their cities are rat- and crime-infested hellholes. And those hellholes are being sustained through November. So Republicans, led by a black senator, offered to do the work the Democrats will not do. He offered to reform police departments and to try to begin restoring order to Democrat-run cities under the silly belief that they were interested in restoring order. They aren’t. Not right now.

The lack of law, the lack of order, all of that is seen as helpful to the agenda of getting rid of Donald Trump. They ended up smearing Scott for his efforts. All he did was take them seriously. All he did was afford them the respect that they demand. He believed they really were interested in police reform. He believed after the George Floyd episode that the Democrats really did want something to get fixed so that this kind of stuff would stop.

BRETT: We’re gonna be getting more into the racial aspects of the speech in the next hour. And it’s an important conversation, especially noting that Senator Scott today is going to be speaking with the Floyd family. He may have already done it this morning, but he is scheduled to speak with George Floyd’s family to figure out the pathway forward.