(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) The morning session of the Heritage Foundation’s leadership summit brought a study in senatorial contrasts between two Republican lawmakers, Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Tim Scott of South Carolina.
The differences extended beyond the obvious—Lee as one of the nation’s whitest senators and Scott as the only African-American GOP senator currently in office—but also stylistically.
Scott himself seemed to recognize this fact. “Mike Lee graduated cum laude. I graduated ‘Thank you, Lawdy,” said Scott, whose remarkable story recounts how his grandfather, a former sharecropper in the Deep South, lived to see his grandson sworn in as a U.S. senator.
While Lee’s speech waded into the weeds with a history lesson on the federal administrative state’s ascendancy—beginning with a specific 1937 Supreme Court state that allowed the government to reimagine the Constitution’s commerce clause—Lee focused more brooadly on themes that were apt to play well to a general audience on the 2024 presidential campaign trail.
“We understand that the seed of greatness, not the sea of grievance, is our future,” he said.
Tim specifically criticized the contemporary Left’s attack on traditional values, which included the promotion of government dependency via Critical Race Theory and undermining national security interests through open borders.
“It’s almost like they’ve created a blueprint to ruin America,” he said.
But he also channeled former President Ronald Reagan with what is sure to be a future campaign slogan, discussing a “new American sunrise.”
“We are the country that continues to prevail over the forces of evil,” said Scott, who recently formed an exploratory committee to weigh entering the crowded GOP primary field for next year’s presidential election.
His notes of optimism were a welcome balm for a conference that dwelled heavily on the existential struggle to regain the country in what has seemed more than ever to be a losing battle on many fronts.
That included Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s revelation that during the 2020 election, only one court case of the dozen waged in his state to push mass mail-in ballots might have resulted in the Lone Star State getting flipped blue—and permanently altering the American political landscape.
“If the ballots go out, game over—and we lose,” Paxton said, noting the loss of Georgia as an example.
The conference seemed heavy on its emphasis of Reagan’s principles while seeming to tiptoe around the elephant NOT in the room, former President Donald Trump.
While Trump was not on the speaker list, his top intra-party rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was due to deliver a keynote speech at the conference on Friday, giving what was expected to be a major policy speech.
But Trump’s influence also resonated, particularly in the speech by Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who immediately followed Scott.
Vance called for accountability for the neocons of the George W. Bush era who took America into the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Heritage President Kevin Roberts also struck a defiant, populist tone in his early remarks.
“No more bringing butter knives to gunfights,” he said. “We’ve learned that.”
Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., also were due to speak Thursday afternoon.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
