{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.scott.senate.gov/media-center/press-releases/icymi-senator-scott-discusses-his-childhood-vision-for-america-and-more-on-pbss-firing-line/", "ICYMI: Senator Scott Discusses His Childhood, Vision for America, and More on PBS\u2019s \u2018Firing Line\u2019", "2021-11-22", "2021", "2021-11", "Republican", "Senate", "SC", "Tim Scott", "S001184", "www.scott.senate.gov", "timscott", "https://www.scott.senate.gov/media-center/press-releases/jsf/jet-engine:press-list", "scraper", "WASHINGTON \u2013 This weekend, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) joined PBS\u2019s \u201cFiring Line\u201d with Margaret Hoover to discuss growing up in poverty and how his experiences shaped his positions on education, police reform, and more.\n\nClick to watch the full interview\n\nExcerpts from the interview:\n\nOn Education Curricula \u2026 \u201cIn education, we should never teach people that any form of discrimination is okay. It\u2019s kind of that simple. And as a kid who went to public high schools and who understands the challenges of race in America intimately and personally, I can tell you that I benefitted from not having [a] curriculum designed around racial outcomes or \u2018oppressed versus oppressors.\u2019 \u2026\n\n\u201cHere\u2019s what I think. Number one, we\u2019ve made more progress in the last 50 years than we did in the first 190. Number two, we still have a ways to go. Both can be true because both are true. And if we were to celebrate the progress \u2014 at the same time looking for ways to address the problems \u2014 I think most Americans would lean into that position. But what we don\u2019t want is to have our kids indoctrinated on any topic. We want to teach our kids how to think, not what to think, and that\u2019s what\u2019s missing.\u201d\n\nOn Progress in America \u2026 \u201cMy grandfather, born in 1921 in South Carolina, experienced a very different South Carolina [than I did]. He had to get off the sidewalk when a white person was coming; he couldn\u2019t look you in the eye. My mother was born in 1944, during a time where all the water fountains were \u2018colored\u2019 or \u2018white.\u2019 But by the time I am in high school, where we had [racial] tension, you also had people sitting together and hanging out. Fast forward to my nephew, who has just graduated \u2026 when I brought all of his friends to lunch after graduation, it looked like the United Nations. I can\u2019t look at that and say, \u2018Boy, we\u2019re going backwards.\u2019 It\u2019s absolutely not true. We are going forward by leaps.\u201d\n\nOn Police Reform \u2026 \u201cTruth be told, I don\u2019t know why [the Democrats] keep walking away from such an important table. \u2026 I\u2019m here for the long haul. I think this is something we have to get done. Let me give you some good news, though, on this topic. There were four or five areas that we all agreed on. \u2026 Is something better than nothing? The answer is absolutely it is. But \u2026 what they wanted was essentially federalizing local law enforcement and still fighting over the funding that departments would be eligible for. Those [are two issues that] I hope we can find paths around. I\u2019m not going to reduce funding, and I\u2019m not going to federalize local law enforcement.\u201d\n\nOn Opportunity Zones \u2026 \u201c[Opportunity Zones attract] the private sector, when they make a profit, to come back to marginalized communities that are disproportionately majority-minority and invest money long-term. What I do not want, what I did not want, and what I will not ever want is for people to come into a community, make a profit off the community, and run away with their money. I wanted them to plant roots for five, seven, 10 years. And frankly, $75 billion in just three years has been committed to Opportunity Zones, where on-average, we\u2019ve seen property values go up double-digits, which means that we\u2019re closing the wealth gap because the gentrification rate is under 5 percent in those zones, meaning that the people who are there are benefitting from what\u2019s happening in their backyards.\u201d\n\nOn Making it Easier to Vote and Harder to Cheat \u2026 \u201cI think, if you look at the Georgia law, this is a classic example of something that\u2019s actually making it easier to vote. Most of the people who have demonized the law didn\u2019t really read the law, so they\u2019re going on headlines, [which are] not always the most accurate. Before the pandemic, it was illegal to have a drop box where you could drop your votes off. In the Georgia law, it codifies and makes it legal to have drop boxes. There\u2019s a big debate over early voting, and I think it\u2019s a worthy debate. In Georgia, there are more early voting days than in blue states throughout the country. \u2026\n\n\u201cThe federal law, H.R. 1, which is the way that the Democrats want to take it, says tax dollars should go into my personal campaign account. That\u2019s wrong! Why would we compel Democrats to put money into a Republican campaign account, or Republicans into a Democrat\u2019s campaign account? Number two, we should not make ballot harvesting legal. We shouldn\u2019t allow for one person to pick up hundreds \u2014 if not thousands \u2014 of ballots and decide which ones they turn in [and] which ones they don\u2019t turn in. That\u2019s the kind of stuff that we don\u2019t need.\u201d\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T20:30:49Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.scott.senate.gov/media-center/press-releases/icymi-senator-scott-discusses-his-childhood-vision-for-america-and-more-on-pbss-firing-line/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.657101023942232, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}