About 15 years ago, a Jewish entrepreneur from Charleston, South Carolina, took a young, local politician under his wing, and helped him get started in business. Little did the entrepreneur know that more than a decade later the politician would be elected to Congress and that his future son-in-law would serve as the congressman’s top advisor. Meet Rep. Tom Scott (R-SC) and Nick (Nosson) Muzin, who have formed an extraordinary alliance on Capitol Hill    

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heir backgrounds could hardly be more disparate. Tim Scott grew up in a single-parent home in Charleston, South Carolina. Nick Muzin was raised in a stable, Orthodox Jewish home in Toronto.

While Scott was at risk of flunking out of high school, Muzin was hurtling along on a fast track to earn medical and legal degrees at Albert Einstein and Yale.

Their divergent paths crossed when Muzin served as legal counsel for his father-in-law’s private equity firm in Charleston and Tim Scott was running for lieutenant governor, seeking support from the local business community. One of the roles of South Carolina’s lieutenant governor is to oversee the state office on aging, so Scott found that tapping Muzin’s knowledge of health care issues produced added value for his campaign.

When local congressman Henry Brown announced his retirement in early 2010, Muzin called Scott and suggested he drop his race for lieutenant governor and run for Congress instead.

“Tim came over to my house on a Motzaei Shabbos, together with his campaign manager,” says Muzin. “I had prepared what I thought was an outline for a winning campaign. We went through it and Tim said, ‘I think I’m going to go for it.’$$separate quotes$$”

Scott did go for it and won in a landslide, with 65 percent of the vote. In doing so, he became one of two African-American Republicans since 1901 to win seats in the House of Representatives while running from former Confederate states.

With Republicans having recaptured control of the House of Representatives and looking for fresh blood, the incoming GOP House leaders tabbed Scott to join the Republicans’ 12-member leadership team. They viewed Scott as a Tea Party conservative who appeals to evangelicals and whose strong election showing demonstrated that Republicans can run on conservative political values and still draw strong support from minorities.

Scott has gotten off to a fast start as a freshman congressman. He sponsored the House bill to de-authorize and rescind funding for ObamaCare and has sponsored legislation to prevent the federal government from interfering with the rights of workers.

Gentleman’s Quarterly (GQ Magazine) recently ranked Scott 29^th on a list of the 50 most powerful people in Washington, thanks to the fact that his membership on the leadership team places him in the same room every week with House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Scott was also invited to address the recent AIPAC convention, a rarity for a first-term congressman. He met in a small, private gathering with some 70 convention delegates and later joined a panel discussion devoted to bipartisan support for Israel on Capitol Hill. Even though the ground rules required both parties to uphold the spirit of bipartisanship, Democratic congresswoman Nita Lowey deviated when she advised the crop of Tea Party freshmen to remember when clamoring for budget cuts that foreign aid to Israel is part of the federal budget.

“Tim is never one to back down from a challenge,” said Muzin. “While he praised Obama’s AIPAC speech for ‘saying the right things on Iran,’ he turned to Lowey and added: ‘But let’s see what Obama says when he’s not speaking to AIPAC.’$$separate quotes$$”

“For me, labels like ‘Tea Party’ or ‘conservative Republican’ don’t mean that much,” said Rep. Scott, as we sit side by side in armchairs in Suite 1117 on the first floor of the Longworth Office Building, one of Washington’s three offices for House members. “I look at myself as an American who believes in, and lives by the notion that you have to spend a little less than you make.”

That sounds like old-fashioned, Calvin Coolidge Republicanism, I suggest.

“It’s a simple philosophy,” says Scott. “It really is.”

Muzin, who sits quietly but attentively on the sofa behind Scott, served as Scott’s chief of staff during his first year in Congress. Now, he is Scott’s senior advisor and national political director of TIM-PAC. Tim is not only the congressman’s first name but an acronym for Tomorrow is Meaningful. The goal of their political action committee is to build a national infrastructure — through strategy, communications, and fundraising — to elect candidates that support Israel, are committed to lowering taxes and reforming health care, and embody the “entrepreneurial spirit” of America. In Washington, formation of such a PAC is often a sign of higher political ambitions, as politicians who raise funds for other members of Congress can ask for those favors to be returned when needed.

Last month, Scott showed up on a short list of potential Republican vice-presidential candidates put together by Human Events, a longstanding, conservative publication that the late President Ronald Reagan considered his favorite.

On the plus side, Human Events said Scott “can help the nominee with tea partiers and potentially blunt the enthusiasm of African Americans for Obama. Further, for Romney he would mitigate the mainstream media’s focus on the Mormon church’s exclusionary history,” while noting that Scott’s main liability on the ticket is lack of experience on the national stage.

Shabbos Deadlines

Tomorrow this might all be meaningful, but today brings another full day of business in the House of Representatives and that’s where Scott, 46, and Muzin, 36, with the bulk of their careers ahead of them, are focusing their efforts.

Their bond began a little more than four years ago, when Muzin and his wife, Andrea, moved to Charleston for a few years. It is based both on a mutual respect for each other’s talents and their mutual appreciation of each other’s religious beliefs.

“He’s a very religious person,” says Muzin about Scott. “He reads the Bible every day in his office. He’s always quoting verses to me and I quote verses to him.”

With candlelighting time arriving very early in the northeast on winter Fridays, Muzin says that Scott will often prioritize Friday’s agenda by saying “we need to get this done before Shabbos.”

Scott also makes sure that Muzin is never undernourished on Capitol Hill. “He is always asking me, ‘Can you eat this?’ or “Can we get you something kosher to eat?” says Muzin.

For his part, Scott says that his school of hard-knocks background has taught him the value of channeling one’s life experiences to connect with others, and that’s what he respects most about Nick Muzin. “His foundation of being a faith-filled person who understands that who he is, is far more important than what he does actually invigorates my soul and makes me more focused and sharper.”

Scott himself had his political and religious mettle tested back in 1995, after his election to the Charleston County Council made him the first black Republican elected to any office in South Carolina since Reconstruction.

Two years later, Scott led a move to post the Ten Commandments outside the county council chambers, saying it would remind members of the absolute rules they should follow.

The council agreed by unanimous vote. Scott went ahead and nailed a King James version of the Ten Commandments to the wall. It didn’t take long for the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State to sue the county. After an initial court ruling saying the display was unconstitutional, the council decided not to appeal to avoid accruing more legal fees. Scott was criticized for the costs the county already incurred, although he said at the time: “Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal is worth it.”

Looking back at that case today, what does he feel that he gained from it?

“I learned how to take a punch,” said Scott, “but I also learned the lesson that all good is typically attacked, and to think otherwise is to be naïve. The Ten Commandments served as a foundation of the legal system in this county. To forget that foundation is also to forget why we have been prosperous and successful, but more importantly, a significant nation in this world.”

Learning to Think Big  

Scott took more than his share of punches growing up in Charleston. His parents divorced when he was seven, and his mother was a nurse who often worked a double shift to make ends meet.

He attended school in an era when he and many of his peers thought that the path to success cut through the football gridiron or the silver screen.

“Tim talks about how in 10^th grade he failed every subject,” says Muzin. “One of his favorite jokes is that when you fail both English and Spanish they don’t call you bilingual.”

It wasn’t that Scott wasn’t capable; he just didn’t focus on his studies. His true talents lay elsewhere. His first political post was as a student council member. A schoolmate encouraged him to run because he saw Tim had a knack for entertaining and inspiring people with jokes and speeches.

In high school, Scott took a part-time job selling tickets at a local movie theater. That’s where he got his first big break, although it had nothing to do with Hollywood. Scott would head over to the local Chick-fil-A outlet on his lunch hour, where he always bought French fries because he couldn’t afford the chicken sandwich.

Store owner John Moniz, an evangelical Christian who never opened his restaurants on Sundays even though it theoretically cost him business, befriended Scott and took him under his wing. One day, Moniz saved Scott the trip. He went inside the movie theater and slid a Chick-fil-A sandwich that Scott couldn’t afford across the desk.

“For the next couple of years, he [Moniz] started talking to me about my goals and my aspirations,” said Scott. “Mine were based on football and entertainment. John would challenge me by saying, ‘Have you ever thought about going to college and getting a degree? Have you ever thought about owning your own business, or working in an area for which you have passion and changing the world that way?”

Scott took Moniz’s advice and enrolled in Charleston Southern University, earning a BS in political science in 1988.

Building Bonds

His next professional mentor was Jerry Zucker, the man who eventually became Nick Muzin’s father-in-law. Zucker, a son of Holocaust survivors, was born in Tel Aviv and had developed business interests in textiles, aerospace polymers, and science-based manufacturing.

“Jerry had maybe hundreds of patents and 40 companies but he took three hours in the middle of his day to have lunch with me,” says Scott, who credits Zucker for having helped him start his own insurance company.

Muzin hails from a far more comfortable background, as he explained after my interview with Congressman Scott was done. Muzin and I were riding in a taxi, cruising past the Capitol building, the Washington Monument, and other national sites on our way to Eli’s, a popular kosher restaurant on 20^th Street in Washington DC.

Born in Montreal, his family moved to Toronto when he was five. He attended Yeshivas Ner Yisroel in Toronto and established a close relationship with both the former rosh yeshivah, Rabbi Gavriel Ginsburg ztz”l and with the current rosh yeshivah, Rabbi Uri Mayerfeld. After high school, Muzin studied in the Talmudical Yeshiva of Philadelphia and attended Yeshiva University and the Albert Einstein Medical School, doing a shomer Shabbos residency in internal medicine in the Westchester Medical Center.

“I always had this idea of going to both medical school and law school and being involved in health care policy, so after finishing my internship I took my boards, got certified as a doctor, and went to Yale Law School,” said Muzin.

He took the bar exam on his 30^th birthday. He safely assumed that Washington DC would provide him with his best career opportunity; it did, but it also provided him with one more unexpected benefit. “Within six weeks of moving to Washington DC, I met my wife, Andrea, through mutual friends in our shul,” says Muzin.

Muzin’s first job in Washington was at Williams & Connolly LLP, a prominent litigation firm that represents doctors in medical malpractice cases and drug companies in pharmaceutical products liability.

Shortly after the Muzins’ first child was born, the family moved to Charleston to help care for Andrea’s father, who was terminally ill.  Muzin became corporate counsel for the family business, the InterTech group, a private equity firm that was also politically well connected.

It was during this period that Muzin and Scott first met. Muzin says one of the first issues the two men bonded on was Israel.

“Tim has a passion for helping Israel,” said Muzin. “He’s an evangelical Christian, so he really believes that ‘he who blesses the Jewish People will be blessed and he who curses them will be cursed.’”

The Gaza flotilla incident occurred in the midst of Scott’s congressional campaign. Israel was being excoriated in the international media for having boarded the flotilla, which resulted in the deaths of nine passengers, even though the ship had violated Israel’s territorial waters and passengers had attacked the Israeli naval soldiers who boarded the ship.

“Tim wanted to issue a news release in support of Israel,” says Muzin. “As much as I could relate to his sentiments, I reminded him that this wasn’t exactly a burning issue for his constituents in Charleston, South Carolina. Tim said, ‘Nick, I know that, but it’s the right thing to do, so I want to do it.’$$separate quotes$$”

Scott’s election to Congress brought new blessings for the Muzin family. Their daughter was now three and ready to enter preschool. They were ecstatic to have the opportunity to move back to the Washington area, and they settled in the more observant community of Silver Spring, Maryland.

The first year back in Washington was hectic. As chief of staff, Muzin had to hire junior staffers and set up all of the office procedures. Now, in Scott’s second year, health care reform — mainly finding a less costly alternative to ObamaCare — has taken up a large chunk of their time.

To Your Health

“Our responsibility is that we live up to the promises that we’ve already made before we start making more promises,” says Scott. “National health care is a wonderful concept but ObamaCare is based on the idea that we need to provide health insurance for 15 percent of America because 85 percent already have it.”

Scott contends that more than half of the uninsured would not purchase health insurance out of personal choice, no matter how low the cost. “Our position is we should find a way to make sure that access to health care happens for those that desperately need it. It doesn’t, however, necessitate a $2.6 trillion new entitlement to provide health care for 7 percent of the people knowing that after the first ten years of the program, it will go broke.”

This is where Nick Muzin steps in, with his specialized knowledge of the medical industry, as well as his access to rabbinical advice.

Muzin said he recently had the opportunity to ask a prominent rosh yeshivah for a Torah perspective on nationalized health care, and was told that society has an obligation to help.

“You can’t just say I don’t care, it’s not my business, or it’s not my problem,” said Muzin. “You have to help. Now, you can argue that nationalized health care won’t work, or it will do more harm than good. That I can hear, said the rosh yeshivah, but just to wash your hands of it is not an eitzah. So we’ve been working on trying to build an internal think tank of people to arrive at some solutions.”

Working toward that goal, Muzin has been scheduling regular meetings with insurance companies, pharmaceutical and medical device makers, and speaking to patients’ and doctors’ groups, to try to come up with a more “conservative” solution to the problems plaguing the health care system.

Scott insists that with the right type of teamwork, a solution will be found.

“The reason why I’ve chosen to take a leading position on the health care debate is because I have Nick on my team. Nick understands not only the legislative consequences but the actual consequences and the impact on a patient. And that makes me a far better advocate for people who are in desperate need of help.

“My story, from the time I was 14 years old, is that we are better together,” adds Scott.  “That’s what my mentors taught me. Trying to accomplish big things by yourself means you will fail miserably. So go out and find the best partners you can.”

(Originally featured in MIshpacha Issue 403)