his vote, and joined the rest of the South Carolina congressional delegation in voting No. Committee assignments The House Republican Steering Committee appointed Scott to the Committee on Transportation and the Committee on Small Business. He was later appointed to the Committee on Rules and relinquished his other two assignments. Committee on Rules Subcommittee on Rules and the Organization of the House U.S. Senate (2013–present) 2012 appointment On December 17, 2012, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley announced she would appoint Scott to replace retiring Senator Jim DeMint, who had previously announced that he would retire from the Senate to become the President of The Heritage Foundation. Scott is the first African American U.S. senator from South Carolina. He was one of three black U.S. Senators in the 113th Congress, alongside Mo Cowan and later Cory Booker (and the first since Roland Burris retired in 2010 after succeeding Barack Obama). He is the first African American to be a U.S. senator from the Southern United States since Reconstruction. During two periods, first from January 2, 2013, until February 1, 2013, and again from July 16, 2013, until October 31, 2013, Scott was the only African-American senator. He and Cowan were the first black senators to serve alongside each other. News media reported that Scott, Representative Trey Gowdy, former South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, former First Lady of South Carolina Jenny Sanford, and South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control Director Catherine Templeton were on Haley's short list to replace DeMint. Of choosing Scott, Haley said, "It is important to me, as a minority female, that Congressman Scott earned this seat, he earned this seat for the person that he is. He earned this seat with the results he has shown." Elections 2014 Scott ran to serve the final two years of DeMint's term and won. In January 2014, he signed an amicus brief in support of Senator Ron Johnson's legal challenge to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's Affordable Care Act ruling. 2016 Scott was reelected to a full term in office. He was endorsed by the Club for Growth. In July 2018, Scott and Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris introduced a bipartisan bill to make lynching a federal hate crime. In February 2019, Scott was one of 16 senators to vote against legislation preventing a partial government shutdown and containing $1.375 billion for barriers along the U.S.-Mexico