Copyright Charleston Post and Courier
More than a week after U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace's tirade at the Charleston airport, it's still not clear precisely what happened. Ms. Mace says the airport staff put her life in danger in the runup to her obscenity-laden display and on other occasions, and if that’s true, then she absolutely was right to blow the whistle. In fact, she should have done so sooner if this was, as she said, the 24th time this year that airport security failed in its implicit promise to secure her safety. Since there’s a discrepancy about precisely what happened when she arrived at the airport, she’s right too to demand that airport police provide all the video it has from the time she arrived until she boarded her flight — including the body-cam video showing where the officers were and what they were doing. Unfortunately, the Legislature has failed to require police body-camera video be released to anyone, so her efforts should raise the profile on the need to change that law. Airport officials have said she arrived late in the wrong car and in the wrong place for a prearranged meet-up; what she says are text messages with airport officials show otherwise. Ms. Mace implied that all members of the S.C. congressional delegation received the same special escorts from airport police that she had to wait for in the Oct. 30 incident, but The Post and Courier’s Jason Ryan and Megan Fernandes report that five members of the delegation say they travel like normal passengers. Three others declined to say. In either event, the airport announced last week that it would no longer provide special security for any members of Congress, which makes some sense since there are other entities more directly responsible and better equipped to do that, as Ms. Mace demonstrated Monday when she announced the U.S. Capitol Police and the Charleston Police Department have agreed to take over her security. But one simple thing is clear: Rep. Mace's foul language and her attitude toward security and other airport staff were out of bounds. Most people would have apologized after such an embarrassing display, perhaps explaining that they were understandably angry or even frightened and said things they now regret. Not Nancy Mace. Nancy Mace has built her public persona around using socially unacceptable language. If I cursed at these underlings, she told a news conference last week, I should have cursed more. No, she shouldn’t have. That's not leadership. That’s someone who either is unable to control her rage or else has made a calculated decision not to control it. Yelling those obscenities at people who have less power than you do isn’t leadership either. Yelling obscenities at the little people shows contempt for the public and, in this case, police. It's the attitude of a perpetual backbencher who doesn't need to advance from that position. To recap: Ms. Mace had a tirade in public. Airport officials acknowledged that they missed meeting her when she arrived at the airport; they might or might not have mischaracterized the situation when they were asked about it by the media. If they did mischaracterize what preceded the yelling, they were completely wrong. But that didn’t justify her response. When Ms. Mace’s efforts to deflect attention from her behavior didn’t seem to be working and other Republicans started criticizing her profanity-laced tirade, she turned to that classic liberal maneuver: pulling out the gender card. She accused U.S. Sens. Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham of “attacking a woman” and sarcastically wrote that “Lindsey Graham all of a sudden wants to talk about women.” It should be particularly offensive to Republicans, who have rightly criticized liberals for playing this game, to see it coming from someone who claims to be one of them. (If you’re a liberal, you don’t get to join in this part of the criticism.) It also should be particularly offensive to see how little a fellow Republican thinks of the law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every day for our safety. Perhaps most telling about this whole episode is that it even brought a rebuke from Sen. Scott, who does not tend to get involved in our state's political battles. The line of attack that apparently brought him into the scuffle was Ms. Mace’s complaint to airport police that Mr. Scott wouldn't have been treated the way she says she was. We don't know whether or not that's true, but we feel pretty confident saying Mr. Scott wouldn't have treated other human beings the way she treated the police officers who were just trying to do their job. As he noted, airport police and the other people Ms. Mace traumatized during her display don’t work for him. He works for them. As do all members of the Congress. Click here for more opinion content from The Post and Courier.
