Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has made publicity stunts a regular part of her routine in Congress.
She quipped that her then-fiance wanted her to stay in bed with her before speaking at a prayer breakfast, she helped oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and she wore a scarlet letter A to a Republican Conference meeting.
But in her latest bid for viral fame, the congresswoman from South Carolina decided that she was going to adopt the tenets of critical race theory and accuse Hunter Biden of “white privilege.”
Biden, the recovering drug addict son of the president of the United States, was attending a mark-up of a contempt resolution against him by the House Oversight Committee. The contempt resolution was drawn up after Biden refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the committee.
“You are the epitome of white privilege,” Mace told Biden. “Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls to come up here.”
It’s a comment, made to Hunter Biden’s face, that will surely help make Mace a champion of the Republican base. But it’s not a comment worth celebrating. Of all the things she could have said, the congresswoman decided that she was going to chalk up Biden’s smug stunt to his skin color.
Not his family, not his wealth, not his connections. His skin color.
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The problem is Mace is engaging in a tried-and-failed tradition of Republican politics: use the Left’s terminology against them as some sort of clever comeback, all while ceding the entire premise that such terms draw their legitimacy from.
It would be nice to see Republicans not resort to identity politics or use loaded terms such as “white privilege” that imply a particular worldview inconsistent with conservative ideals. But in 2024, that’s just too much to ask.