Senate Banking Chairman Tim Scott , R-S.C., is leading the charge to move forward on legislation that would establish regulations for the sale and transfer of digital assets known as stablecoins, saying he believed President Donald Trump gave Congress a “mandate” to send it to the president’s desk quickly. But House Financial Services Chairman French Hill, R-Ark., has indicated he wants to reconcile the Senate-passed bill with stablecoin legislation approved by his panel in April, with the possibility of attaching additional legislation that would establish a market structure for digital assets. Scott said he had been in “constant communication” with Hill, while Trump has used social media to call on the House to clear the stablecoins bill. Scott also indicated he would like to pass the market legislation separately by September.
Getting to Congress: Scott began his professional career in the insurance industry, eventually founding his own agency. At 29, Scott announced he was running for Charleston City Council. But when he approached the local Democratic Party, he was told he would have to wait his turn, he told CBS News. “So I looked at the issues I wanted to run on and I said, ‘Well, these are more aligned with the Republican Party. And they said, ‘You can run now,'” he said in the 2018 interview. He won the seat as a Republican and got more involved in GOP politics. By 1996, he was co-chair of the late Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond’s reelection campaign. Scott served on the City Council for 15 years until moving to the South Carolina House in 2009. He won his U.S. House seat the following year and quickly established himself as a facilitator within the GOP. In 2013 he was appointed to the Senate to replace outgoing GOP Sen. Jim DeMint, becoming the first Black Republican senator from the South since the Reconstruction era. He handily defeated Democrat Joyce Dickerson in a 2014 special election and won a full term in 2016 with more than 60 percent of the vote.
His State: With a population of a little over 5 million, South Carolina is among the fastest-growing states in the U.S., adding more than a quarter of a million residents between 2000 and 2025. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that more than a quarter of the population lives in the coastal low country and sea islands. Tourism is a major pull along the coast, and the Port of Charleston, in the state’s largest city, is an engine for a valuable export market. But sea level rise and extreme weather events have increasingly placed coastal communities and infrastructure at risk. The state also has a robust manufacturing center, including French tiremaker Michelin, headquartered in Greenville. Politically, South Carolina is reliably conservative. The state hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since Ernest F. Hollings in 1998. He retired at the end of that final term.
What’s New: Scott led the Banking Committee’s portion of Senate changes to the GOP’s House-passed budget reconciliation package. But Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough rejected the committee’s attempt at zeroing out the budget of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a centerpiece of Scott’s original proposal, deeming that effectively shuttering the agency was a policy decision prohibited under the so-called Byrd rule, which limits reconciliation to budgetary matters. As a result, Scott revised his original proposal to significantly diminish the bureau’s funding. On June 26, the committee released a proposal to cap the agency’s income at 6.5 percent of the Federal Reserve’s earnings in 2009, down from the current 12 percent level.
Point of Interest: Scott is only the second person to occupy his suite in the Hart Senate Office Building, which opened in 1982. The late Utah Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch had occupied the space for 36 years before his retirement made it available in 2019. In a video shared on social media, Scott’s staffers danced and moved boxes, bins and bubble wrap over a soundtrack of “Movin’ On Up,” the theme song from long-running sitcom “The Jeffersons.”
Mark Schoeff Jr. contributed to this report.
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