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Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., returned to his home state the day after nine people were killed in Charleston's Emanuel AME Church. The crime was emotionally devastating for many of his constituents, and the senator himself lost a friend in the attack. He took time out for a wide ranging conversation about the shooting, what he believes may have caused it, and how he'd like his state — and the country — to move forward. A version of the interview aired on Here & Now.

Interview Highlights

Remembering his friend Clementa Pinckney

He was a Democrat, I'm a Republican. When I got elected to Congress, one of the calls that I received, one of the first that I saw was Clementa Pinckney, and his goal was to find a way for he and I to bring people together. And one of the ways that I hope to remember him is to work harder at bringing people together. To be a bridge that makes sense, and to be included in the conversations, no matter how difficult they are, no matter how varied the topics, to be a part of the conversation of restoring hope and creating opportunities for as many Americans and as many around the world as possible. That is how I think I can best serve my friend who is now gone.

On the role of gun laws

Anyone who has the level of hate in their heart that it scrambles their brains, perhaps someone would call that mental illness. I just call that hatred.

Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina

What gun law would have stopped a person with a hand gun? The only gun law that comes to mind that can do that is banning guns, and I am completely in opposition of that. I think it's very clear that we are looking for a solution that a new law may not be the answer to, in this case specifically. He was already breaking laws by having a gun because he was awaiting a felony charge. He certainly took a gun into a place where you can't take a gun into, which is a place of worship. So, the laws that are on the books did not stop him from doing so. It's the old saying that ..."locks are for good people." In other words, if you have someone who is willing to obey the law, it will work. Unfortunately, the fact is that there isn't a law that someone can think of that would have prevented this situation.

Does it matter if it's called 'terrorism?'

I don't know what matters to me more than the fact that I've lost a friend. Us trying to put the definition of why he did what he did is not as important to me today, as it may be in a week. Today, I know that my friend is gone, and eight members of his congregation [are] gone, because of someone who was so filled with hate, so filled with venom, that they acted out in the most violent horrific way possible, and that grieves my heart, and cuts my soul ... As we all will look for labels to put on this situation, I think we can all agree that this was a crime of hate, and that this is a challenge that we will have to address, and that we will address as a community.

'My people' becomes 'our people'

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The Rev. Sidney Davis leads mourners at Charleston's Second Presbyterian Church during a community prayer service for the nine victims of the shooting at the historic Emanuel AME Church. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Rev. Sidney Davis leads mourners at Charleston's Second Presbyterian Church during a community prayer service for the nine victims of the shooting at the historic Emanuel AME Church.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

I just received a text from a friend of mine from Colorado saying he was praying for me and praying for my people. And then he corrected himself and said, "I'm praying for our people because we are — in essence — one before the good Lord, and one as a nation." And frankly, that's how I see this. I see this as an issue of a demented, evil person striking terror in the hearts, and then killing nine people. Was race a factor? Obviously! He said that he was going to kill black people so there's no doubt that race is one of the motivations, and frankly I'm sure that he will get justice at the fullest extent of the law.

On whether mental illness was the primary factor in the attack

I think it's hate. I don't think mental illness is the reason why he did what he did. I think anyone who has the level of hate in their heart that it scrambles their brains, perhaps someone would call that mental illness. I just call that hatred.

Charleston Shooting

Senator Tim Scott

Emanuel AME

For several years, Democrats have gleefully watched as Republicans threatened to eat their own at the ballot box. Trying to enforce a rigid orthodoxy, groups such as the Senate Conservatives Fund, the Club for Growth and others have funded primary challengers if Republicans didn't fall in line on certain votes on taxes, spending cuts and other conservative issues.

Now, it's Democrats' turn to try and manage intra-party turmoil — also rooted in a similar economic populist strain to the fight on the right — over President Obama's trade legislation. The fight could spill over into the next election, with labor groups threatening primaries against members — even those who sit in swing districts — who sided with the president.

Last Friday, the fast-track authority the president wanted to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership failed in the House after Democrats blocked a key part of the bill that would provide job-training assistance to those who could lose jobs if the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a massive Pan-Asian trade deal, is finalized.

Part of that fast-track authority — with the job-training assistance stripped out — passed the House Thursday narrowly, 218-208. But it still has to get through the Senate before the president can sign it. The challenge for President Obama now is how to get enough Democrats on board in the Senate without the job assistance in the bill or if there will be a supplementary bill that puts it back in.

Labor groups — a well-funded and powerful Democratic stronghold — waged a massive campaign against the bill and claimed victory after it went down last week. Several Democrats found themselves targeted by unions and progressive groups, warning consequences if they backed the trade bill.

"Democrats who allowed the passage of Fast Track Authority for the job-killing TPP, should know that we will not lift a finger or raise a penny to protect you when you're attacked in 2016," said Jim Dean, chairman of Democracy for America after the House vote Thursday. "We will encourage our progressive allies to join us in leaving you to rot, and we will actively search for opportunities to primary you with a real Democrat. ... Make no mistake, we will make certain that your vote to fast track the destruction of American jobs will be remembered and will haunt you for years to come."

Some have already put their money where their mouth is, too — even if that means inadvertently helping a Republican win next November. The AFL-CIO launched a six-figure ad buy in the expensive New York City media market slamming freshman Democratic Rep. Kathleen Rice for switching her position to back the deal. The freshman congresswoman won her Long Island seat just 52 to 47 percent in 2014.

A Rice spokesman shot back telling Vox, "I wouldn't want to be a labor leader and have to explain to my hardworking nurses or truck drivers or tradesmen why we're wasting hundreds of thousands of their families' dollars attacking a progressive Democrat who's with them on nearly every issue but this bill. And I certainly wouldn't want to have to explain to those workers that if their money is successful, they'll get a staunch anti-union representative as their reward."

The labor group also aired a TV ad against California Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, charging he will "do anything to keep his job, including shipping your job overseas."

In total, just 27 Democrats voted yes on both the Trade Promotion Authority, TPA, and Trade Adjustment Assistance, TAA, measures last week. Most of those members come from centrist districts and are facing tough reelection fights. That includes Bera, who is among the most vulnerable members of Congress after only narrowly winning reelection last November. He has claimed the groups are trying to "bully" him into changing his position and that he's voting for what is best for his district.

But labor groups don't seem fazed by the prospect a Republican who would be at odds with them even more could win the seat.

"Ami Bera won off the support of working families' boots in the district, knocking on doors for him," AFL-CIO spokesperson Amaya Smith told Politico. "But no one's saying, 'Let's not call him out, because we're scared of a Republican taking him out.'"

Another California Democratic lawmaker is already seeing rumblings of a primary challenge. Labor groups are urging Assemblyman Henry Perea to challenge Democratic Rep. Jim Costa, according to Roll Call. Costa also only narrowly won reelection last year.

In California, especially, unions and progressives backing another Democrat could have an impact. The state has a "top-two" party primary system, with the top-two finishers advancing regardless of party. An anti-trade candidate could push past the incumbent in a primary and be favored over the GOP nominee, or a split among Democrats could help two Republicans make it to the general.

Some are starting to see shades of the advent of the Tea Party in the aggressive tactics. New York Times columnist David Brooks certainly thinks so, writing in a column this week raising the idea that "the Republican Tea Partiers are suspicious of all global diplomatic arrangements. The Democrats' version of the Tea Partiers are suspicious of all global economic arrangements."

Other groups say that the biggest threat is that their members won't be helping with grassroots efforts. But if it comes to using the same tactics they decry in conservatives, some Democrats are embracing that moniker.

"To the extent that the Tea Party puts pressure on the Republican Party, then yes, we're also putting pressure on Congress to behave a certain type of way," MoveOn.org Action campaign director Justin Krebs told NPR.

MoveOn.org has already put another top lawmaker on notice over trade. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, faced backlash for his support for the bill, with the group saying there is support for a primary challenger, though no alternative has yet emerged.

Earlier this year, the group Fight for the Future began following Wyden around to town-hall meetings in Oregon with a 30-foot blimp, urging him to oppose the trade deal.

The divide isn't just manifesting itself in Congress, though. With progressives like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders — who's surging in the Democratic presidential primary race — leading the charge, it's an issue that's spilling out into the presidential race, too.

Leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has expressed skepticism about the current deal, but has yet to take a concrete position either for or against the proposal. Previously, as secretary of state, she was in favor of it.

Progressives are promising this will be a defining issue for them next election cycle and beyond — one they will use as a stringent litmus test for candidates.

"We know that our members are deeply committed to this issue," Krebs said. "I think you will see that leading into the 2016 discussion even more."

trans pacific partnership

Ron Wyden

trade

Democrats

Congress

Hillary Clinton

Tea Party

David Brooks

Barack Obama

Noisy trolleys roll bales of tobacco on and off the auction floors in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. Here they call it "green gold." Some of the country's estimated 100,000 small-scale tobacco farmers look on, hoping for profitable sales.

Auctioneers, quoting prices at high speed, pace up and down rows of extra-large jute-covered bundles, with yellow tobacco leaves spilling out.

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Closely behind the auctioneers follow the tobacco buyers. They indicate interest with a wink, a nod, two fingers up, eyes closed and all manner of gestures.
Celani Sithole is an auctioneer and floor manager at TSF — Tobacco Sales Floor — in Harare.

"Our standard sale speed is supposed to be five seconds per bale," she says.

Sithole says they're pushing through 7,000 to 8,000 bales a day. Farmers get their money the day their tobacco is sold.

"As soon as the bales are sold, before arbitration, the farmer has the right to cancel the bale or accept the price," says Sithole.

What we're witnessing on the auction floor is a far cry from just a few years ago. Output of most crops, including tobacco, dropped dramatically when President Robert Mugabe's followers violently drove white farmers, the backbone of the economy, from their industrial-sized farms, starting in 2000.

The government handed the annexed land to black farmers, many of whom had little or no experience. The result was disastrous and the economy collapsed in a spiral of hyperinflation.

Once the breadbasket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe began importing food.

Tobacco production also suffered. Export earnings fell from $600 million in 2000 to $175 million in 2009.

But tobacco output jumped 235 percent last year, compared with 2009.

The CEO of the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board, Andrew Matibiri, says production has rebounded.

"It's back to normal almost," he says. "In terms of world production, we're nowhere near the top — but we're probably at number two or number three, after Brazil and the United States."

Matibiri says farming was especially hard-hit, in part because unlike the industrial white farmers who were landowners, Zimbabwe's new black farmers are leaseholders and couldn't get credit or bank loans without title deeds. So the tobacco sector and private companies stepped in with a new scheme. They contract with tobacco growers to produce the crop, providing fertilizers and chemicals.

Taizivei Chitaunhike is one of those farmers. The mother of four received her five-hectare farm from the government in 2003. She smiles shyly as she describes how her fortunes changed when she became a contract farmer two years ago.

"If you grow with contractors, you will manage to do all the things that you like on your farm," she says. "The amount of capital that they give me helps me. For sure, I'm now much better for farming production. Tobacco is much better, because I manage to do all my budgets on my farm, we manage to pay school fees, labor, get food and other things."

Chitaunhike says she has been up to the auction floors three times this selling season, with almost 25 bales of tobacco, and is getting good prices.

Sitting close by, under a young jacaranda tree, and listening attentively to Chitaunhike, is another tobacco farmer, Milca Matimbe. She's 53 and got her 27-hectare farm ten years ago. Matimbe has been growing tobacco for five years but does not have a contract with a company. She sells independently and is disappointed with sales this season.

"The prices are not so good for us," she says. "Last year it was better than this year, because the prices are not going up, they're going down. Ah but we have got good tobacco. We don't know if we can go back to the fields this coming season, because we've got no money."

Zimbabwe consumes only a fraction of its tobacco output. Tobacco marketing board CEO Matibiri says the flue-cured tobacco is top quality, much prized and expensive. Forty percent of exports go to China, followed by the European Union and South Africa.

"We produce a premium product, which is in demand the world over," he says. "It is said to have very good blending properties. In other words, it mixes very well with lower quality tobaccos produced in other parts of the world, producing nice, very pleasant cigarettes to smoke, if you're a smoker – yeah."

Back on the auction floor, brisk tobacco selling continues. It appears the banks are listening. The Bankers Association of Zimbabwe looks set to lend a billion dollars to agriculture this year — the lion's share going to tobacco farming.

tobacco

Zimbabwe

Soda is at the crossroads.

The U.S. is still a world leader in taking the pause that refreshes (and causes weight gain).

But soda drinking is flat or declining in the West. The reasons are many: Health consciousness. Bottled water. Energy drinks.

So the Big Soda companies are spending money to develop new markets in low- and middle-income countries. In some of these places, people are earning a bit more than a few years before, so there's money for soda.

Health advocates aren't happy that soda consumption is going up in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They would like to see the sale of soda go down because it's pretty well documented that soda just isn't good for you.

New data suggest that Mexico's tax on soda may be one way to get people to drink less soda. (Check out this post from The Salt.) Other countries, including Chile, are considering a similar tax.

But a soda tax won't necessarily lead to a reduction in consumption. "Soda companies could reduce their prices and absorb the tax," points out Dr. Bruce Lee, director of the Global Obesity Prevention Center at Johns Hopkins University.

And there isn't always another drinking option.

"In many low-income countries, access to clean drinking water is limited, so soda becomes a viable alternative," Lee says. "People will say, 'We don't have anything else to drink.' "

One way for countries to address this issue, he suggests, is to levy a soda tax as Mexico did, then use the proceeds to bring clean water to people via aqueducts, water purification systems or better sanitation so water sources aren't contaminated by human waste.

But it's tough to convince soda drinkers to give it up. People's habits are influenced by "what everyone else is doing, what's available, what's cool and hip," says Lee.

Plus, it's easy to drink a lot of soda because it doesn't make you feel full, says Steve Gortmaker, who directs the Harvard School of Public Health Prevention Research Center. With some foods — whole grains, salad — you get a feeling of fullness. With soda, "your body doesn't sense it's getting all these extra calories," he says. "And you consume it so rapidly, a couple hundred calories in a couple of gulps, your body hasn't had a chance to react to it."

Would you drink fewer cans soda if a national tax jacked up the price?

When it comes to schemes to counter the staggering rates of obesity and diabetes around the world, there's a growing consensus that taxes that force consumers to reckon, via their pocketbooks, with their food and drink habits might be the way to go.

But since so few countries – or cities — have dared to try a "sin" tax on soda or junk food, no one really knows if they'd actually work.

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Mexico is one of the only countries in the world that's managed to pass and implement such a tax. (France has done it, too, and Chile is working on it.)

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In January 2014, the price of all sodas and other sugary drinks in Mexico went up by one peso (about seven cents) per liter — about a 10 percent tax. The government also added an 8 percent tax on unhealthy snacks, like potato chips and cookies.

Now, a study by the Mexican National Institute of Public Health and the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill suggests that the tax is working. To be clear, the results, which were released Wednesday, are highly preliminary — the study has been submitted to the prestigious U.S. journal Health Affairs, but it hasn't yet been peer-reviewed or published.

But according to the researchers, who analyzed data on household consumption in 53 Mexican cities, purchases of sugary beverages dropped 6 percent on average in 2014 compared to pre-tax trends. And by December 2014, they'd gone down by 12 percent, compared to previous years.

"Despite promotions and marketing strategies [from beverage companies to counter the tax], the effect of the soda tax in Mexico has been successful," Juan Rivera, a researcher at the Mexico's National Institute of Public Health who was involved with the study, tells The Salt. "Along with other strategies the Mexican government is using, I hope that intake of sugar-sweetened beverages will continue to drop."

As you can see from this handy soda consumption chart from our pals over at Goats And Soda, Mexico comes in fourth worldwide, with about 139 soft drink purchases per capita in 2014. And according to one study looking at the public health burden of sugar-sweetened beverages, some 4,100 deaths per year in Mexico can be attributed to consumption of them.

Not only did people in Mexico drink fewer soda with the tax, they also drank more water, according to the researchers. Their study was funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The tax has been controversial in Mexico, especially in the business community. Unsurpisingly, the beverage industry lobbied hard against it, says Rivera. As Marc Silver over at Goats and Soda reports, Big Soda companies are investing heavily to develop new markets in low- and middle-income countries.

According to a press release touting the study results from the Nutritional Health Alliance, a Mexican public interest coalition, the beverage industry also launched marketing campaigns in Mexico, including "Share a Coke" and personalized Coca-Cola cans, in mid-2014 after the tax went into effect. Still, Rivera says, consumers, on average, chose to cut back more and more as the year wore on.

Consumption dropped most among the lowest socioeconomic group, the researchers say: That group drank 9 percent fewer sugary beverages on average in 2014, and 17 percent less by the end of the year, compared to pre-tax trends.

The government collected a total of $1.3 billion in 2014 from the tax, which it says it is using to fund programs to prevent obesity and its associated diseases — for example, making clean drinking water available in schools that don't currently have it.

As we've reported, only two communities in the U.S. have managed to pass such a policy: the city of Berkeley, Calif., and the Navajo Nation.

But already, advocates here say they see the Mexican study's preliminary results as a sign that soda taxes are an effective measure for improving public health.

"It is time for federal, state and local policymakers to take real action to curb America's rising tide of diabetes and obesity," Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, said in a statement. "A soda tax is a critical step. Mexico has done it for their residents. So can we."

In the meantime, Rivera says he's working to get funding to continue to measure the impact of the Mexican tax in 2015.

And Mexico's Nutritional Health Alliance says it will be lobbying the government to increase the tax from 10 percent to 20 percent to take more of the fizz out of soda sales.