On Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) responded to one of the hundreds of tweets he had gotten condemning him for his support of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general. The response, consisting of one word, was one of the last that went to the offending account, before it was shuttered.

Scott, the only black Republican member of the Senate — previously, one of just two black Republicans in the House — said that he had removed Twitter from his phone years ago but sometimes felt the need to respond to critics.

“I have three or four pages of that kind of crap because of the Sessions nomination,” he said. “There were so many n-words and racially insensitive words coming at me over the Budget Control Act in 2011 that my employees were crying. Unfortunately, people feel like they have a license to say stupid stuff, and too often it comes from liberals. So I thought it was a good time to tell people what I thought.”