Sen. Tim Scott Timothy (Tim) Eugene ScottAuthor Ryan Girdusky: RNC worked best when highlighting 'regular people' as opposed to 'standard Republicans' Now is the time to renew our focus on students and their futures GOP lobbyists pleasantly surprised by Republican convention MORE (R-S.C.), the only African American Republican in the Senate, says reparations for slavery are a “non-starter.”

Scott said Wednesday that it would be too difficult to calculate who deserves compensation and who must pay for the institution of slavery and the years of discriminatory laws that followed its abolition.

“There’s no question that slavery is a scourge on the history of America. The question is: Is reparations a realistic path forward? The answer is no,” Scott said.

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Scott made the comments when asked about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellTrump 'no longer angry' at Romney because of Supreme Court stance On The Money: Anxious Democrats push for vote on COVID-19 aid | Pelosi, Mnuchin ready to restart talks | Weekly jobless claims increase | Senate treads close to shutdown deadline The Hill's Campaign Report: Trump faces backlash after not committing to peaceful transition of power MORE’s (R-Ky.) dismissal of reparations as a viable policy idea. They also come as a House committee holds a historic hearing on the prospect of reparations.

McConnell said Tuesday that he doesn't think “reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea.”

Scott declined to respond directly to McConnell’s remarks, because he said he had not read them, but offered a similar view.

“If you just try to unscramble that egg and figure out who are we compensating, who’s actually paying for it and who was here in 1865 — you start seeing a formula that it’s impossible to unscramble that egg,” Scott said. “So I think that it’s a non-starter.”

Scott said the question of reparations is separate from the election of Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaObama warns of a 'decade of unfair, partisan gerrymandering' in call to look at down-ballot races Quinnipiac polls show Trump leading Biden in Texas, deadlocked race in Ohio Poll: Trump opens up 6-point lead over Biden in Iowa MORE, the nation’s first African American president, in 2008, which McConnell has argued undercuts the case for reparations.

“That’s not relevant to me,” he said. “Reparations has nothing to do with whether you can elect a black president or not. That’s a whole different conversation."

“Reparations are about what happened in the past,” he added.

The issue is a topic of conversation on Capitol Hill this week because the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing Wednesday morning on reparations.

Among those testifying were Sen. Cory Booker Cory Anthony Booker3 reasons why Biden is misreading the politics of court packing Bipartisan praise pours in after Ginsburg's death DHS opens probe into allegations at Georgia ICE facility MORE (D-N.J.) and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose 2014 article “The Case for Reparations” reignited a national dialogue about the issue.

McConnell on Tuesday argued that the nation “tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation, elect[ing] an African American president.”

“I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it. First of all, it would be hard to figure out whom to compensate,” he said.