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| :"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." | :"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." | ||
| Since Thurmond had explicitly supported ] in the presidential campaign to which Lott referred, this statement was widely interpreted to mean that Lott also supported racial segregation. Lott had attracted controversy before in issues relating to civil rights. As a Congressman, he voted against renewal of the ] and opposed the ] Holiday. Lott also maintained an affilation with the ], a group |
Since Thurmond had explicitly supported ] in the presidential campaign to which Lott referred, this statement was widely interpreted to mean that Lott also supported racial segregation. Lott had attracted controversy before in issues relating to civil rights. As a Congressman, he voted against renewal of the ] and opposed the ] Holiday. Lott also maintained an affilation with the ], which is described as a ] by the ADL, NAACP and SPLC. | ||
| Lott's attempts to explain the remark grew from a mild dismissal as an off-the-cuff remark supporting Thurmond's national defense platform to an explicit repudiation of his past and assertions of support for ] in a ] interview. | Lott's attempts to explain the remark grew from a mild dismissal as an off-the-cuff remark supporting Thurmond's national defense platform to an explicit repudiation of his past and assertions of support for ] in a ] interview. | ||
Revision as of 20:58, 23 May 2006
| Trent Lott | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Junior Senator, Mississippi | |
| In office January 1989–Present | |
| Preceded by | John Stennis |
| Succeeded by | Incumbent (2007) |
| Personal details | |
| Nationality | american |
| Political party | Republican |
| Spouse | Patricia Thompson Lott |
Chester Trent Lott (born October 9, 1941 in Grenada, Mississippi) is a United States Senator from Mississippi and a member of the Republican Party.
Political biography
Lott attended college at the University of Mississippi where he obtained an undergraduate degree in public administration in 1965 and a law degree in 1967. He served as a Field Representative for Ole Miss and was president of his fraternity, Sigma Nu. After obtaining his law degree, he moved to Pascagoula (where he still lives today) and began a law practice.
Like most Mississippians at the time, Lott was raised as a Democrat. He served as administrative assistant to House Rules Committee chairman William M. Colmer, also of Pascagoula, from 1968 to 1972. When Colmer, one of the leading segregationists in the Democratic Party, retired after 40 years in Congress, he endorsed Lott as his successor in Mississippi's 5th District, located in the state's southwestern tip, even though Lott ran as a Republican. He won handily.
Lott's switch was part of a growing trend in the South. During the 1960s, cracks had begun to appear in the Democrats' "Solid South", as most white southerners became more willing to vote Republican after the national Democratic Party strongly endorsed racial integration. For example, Barry Goldwater carried Mississippi by winning an unheard-of 87 percent of the popular vote even as he was routed nationally.
It is very likely that Lott would have won even without Colmer's endorsement, as that year's presidential election saw Richard Nixon win reelection in a massive landslide. Nixon won 49 states and 78 percent of Mississippi's popular vote. Lott and his current Senate colleague, Thad Cochran (also elected to Congress that year), were only the second and third Republicans elected to Congress from Mississippi since Reconstruction. In 1974, Lott and Cochran became the first Republicans reelected to Congress from Mississippi since Reconstruction, in both cases by blowout margins. Lott was reelected six more times without much difficulty, and even ran unopposed in 1978. He served as House Minority Whip (the second-ranking Republican in the House) from 1981 to 1989, the first Southern Republican to hold such a high leadership position.
He ran for the Senate in 1988, after 42-year incumbent John Stennis announced he would not run for another term. He defeated Democratic 4th District Congressman Wayne Dowdy by almost eight points, riding the coattails of George H. W. Bush's successful presidential bid. He has never faced another contest nearly that close. He was re-elected in 1994 and 2000 with no substantive Democratic opposition, and is heavily favored in 2006. He gave some thought to retirement for much of 2005, especially after his house was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. However, on January 17, 2006 he announced that he would run for a fourth term.
He became Senate Majority Whip when the Republicans took control of the Senate in 1995, succeeding as Majority Leader in 1996 when Bob Dole resigned from the Senate to focus on his presidential bid. As majority leader, Lott was best known for his role in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. After the House narrowly voted to impeach Clinton, it was obvious the Republicans were far short of the two-thirds majority required under the Constitution to convict Clinton and remove him from office. However, Lott proceeded with the Senate trial in early 1999 under pressure from the far right. He later acquiesced in a decision to suspend the proceedings after the Senate voted not to convict President Clinton.
After the 2000 elections produced a 50-50 partisan split, Vice President Al Gore's tiebreaking vote gave the Democrats the majority from January 3-January 20, 2001, when the George W. Bush Administration took office and Vice President Dick Cheney's tiebreaking vote gave the Republicans the majority once again. Later in 2001, he became Senate Minority Leader once again after Jim Jeffords became an independent and caucused with the Democrats, allowing them to regain the majority. He was to become majority leader again in early 2003 after Republican gains in the November 2002 elections. The Strom Thurmond controversy, however (see below), derailed his chances.
He was a cosponsor of the bill to create a Director of National Intelligence. Despite frequent charges of racism from his critics, Lott has been a strong supporter of high levels of immigration from non-white and third world countries.
Controversy and resignation
Tremendous political controversy ensued following remarks Lott made on December 5, 2002 at the 100th birthday party of Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Thurmond ran for President of the United States in 1948 on the Dixiecrat (or States' Rights) ticket. Lott said:
- "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
Since Thurmond had explicitly supported racial segregation in the presidential campaign to which Lott referred, this statement was widely interpreted to mean that Lott also supported racial segregation. Lott had attracted controversy before in issues relating to civil rights. As a Congressman, he voted against renewal of the Voting Rights Act and opposed the Martin Luther King Holiday. Lott also maintained an affilation with the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is described as a hate group by the ADL, NAACP and SPLC.
Lott's attempts to explain the remark grew from a mild dismissal as an off-the-cuff remark supporting Thurmond's national defense platform to an explicit repudiation of his past and assertions of support for affirmative action in a BET interview.
Once reported in newspapers and television, calls for his resignation as majority leader from both ends of the political spectrum grew. Some Democrats and Republicans considered the remark unconscionable, or as Al Gore put it, "fundamentally racist," and many conservative groups and media were quick to distance themselves from Lott and criticize the incident. Centrist Democrats and Republicans at first defended Lott, insisting the remarks had been blown out of proportion. Some pointed to Sen. Robert Byrd's past as recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan to suggest a double standard, as Byrd was not forced from his leadership position in the Democratic party. Others saw Lott's remarks as simply an attempt to compliment the ancient Thurmond, devoid of any real meaning beyond the context.
After President Bush voiced his own harsh criticism of Lott's remarks ("Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive, and it is wrong. Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country. He has apologized and rightly so. Every day that our nation was segregated was a day our nation was unfaithful to our founding ideals"), Lott's position became untenable. It was obvious he would be unable to remain as Senate Republican Leader, although the official White House line was that Lott did not need to resign.
Lott later agreed with the President's speech. In the aforementioned BET interview, he said, "Segregation is a stain on our nation’s soul... Segregation and racism are immoral."
Under pressure from Senate colleagues, and having lost the support of the White House, Lott resigned as Senate Republican Leader on December 20, 2002. Bill Frist of Tennessee was later elected to the leadership position.
Lott was chosen by his colleagues as Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee after the controversy. Some of his critics for the original remarks have noted that this position still carries a great deal of power, and that conservatives and Republicans were mainly using the whole controversy to get rid of a leader they regarded as weak, particularly in the conduct of the Clinton impeachment trial.
In the book Free Culture, Larry Lessig argues that the resignation of Lott would not have occurred had it not been for the effect of Internet blogs. He says that though the story "disappear from the mainstream press within fouty-eight hours", "bloggers kept researching the story" until, "inally, the story broke back into the mainstream press."
Recent developments
Since he lost the Majority Leader post, Lott has kept relatively quiet. However, Lott started to show an unusual shift from his traditionally strong conservative views when he said that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign within a year. He has also battled with President Bush over military base closures in his home state. Many Capitol Hill observers believe Lott blames the Bush White House, especially GOP political strategist Karl Rove, for losing his post as Senate leader.
Lott is rumored to be making a push to return to GOP leadership. Lott has publicly considered running for Republican Whip after the 2006 elections if the GOP front-runner for that post, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, loses what is expected to be a tough re-election campaign. Additionally, Lott has suggested that he is considering challenging Senator Mitch McConnell to become majority leader , once Sen. Frist retires from the Senate . He has also shown support for passenger rail initiatives, notably, his 2006 bipartisan introduction with Frank Lautenberg, of legislation to provide 80 percent federal matching grants to intercity rail and guarantee adequate funding for Amtrak.
Lott has also written a memoir entitled Herding Cats, A Life in Politics. In the book Lott speaks for the first time on the infamous Strom Thurmond birthday party gaffe. He also speaks out on current Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and about his feelings of betrayal toward the Tennessee Senator, claiming "If Frist had not announced exactly when he did, as the fire was about to burn out, I would still be majority leader of the Senate today." He also described former Majority Leader Tom Daschle (Democrat of South Dakota) as "trustworthy." He also reveals that President Bush, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other GOP leaders played a major role in ending his career as Senate Republican Leader.
2006 re-election campaign
Main article: Mississippi U.S. Senate election, 2006Lott faces no Republican opposition in the race (the filing deadline was March 1, 2006).
There are four Democrats in the June 6, 2006 primary. State representative Erik Fleming is expected to win easily. (Among other things, he is the only candidate with a website as of the end of March.)
Trivia
- With fellow Senators Larry Craig, James Jeffords, and former Senator John Ashcroft, formed a barbershop quartet called The Singing Senators.
- Nic Lott (no relation), the first African American Student Body President at Ole Miss, interned for Senator Trent Lott.
- Congressman Chip Pickering (R-MS) and Congressman Roger Wicker (R-MS) are both former staffers for Trent Lott.
- Mississippi lawyer Richard Scruggs, notable for his role in the state's lawsuit against the tobacco industry, is Lott's brother-in-law. Scruggs is currently representing Lott in a lawsuit against insurance company State Farm because of damage stemming from Hurricane Katrina.
- In 1976 Lott spearheaded efforts to have the constitution amended to repeal the ban of confederate veterans from serving in public office, a successful effort, ultimately merely symbolic and best summed up by his stated belief that Jefferson Davis was a hero.
- In 1962, during Trent's presidency of his fraternity, Sigma Nu, 24 weapons were confiscated in a raid by federal marshalls during desegregation of the University of Mississippi .
- The Star Wars character Lott Dod was named in part after Trent Lott.
Bibliography
- Herding Cats: A Life in Politics (Regan Books: 2005) ISBN 0060599316
- Donald W. Beachler, Militias and Segregationists, Polity, April 2003
External links
- Trent Lott's Senate homepage
- Lott Decried for Part of Salute to Thurmond, The Washington Post, Saturday, December 7 2002; Page A06.
- Sen. Lott Fights to Save Post as Leader, The Washington Post, Saturday, December 14 2002; Page A01
- Lott Remarks on Thurmond Echoed 1980 Words, The Washington Post, Wednesday, December 11 2002; Page A06
- Sen. Lott's New Spin The Washington Post, Saturday, December 14 2002; Page A24
- Talking Points Memo, a political weblog, has posted Lott's racially-inflected Fall 1984 interview with the Southern Partisan and discusses his long-standing association with a paleoconservative group, the Council of Conservative Citizens
- Joe Conason's Journal: Lott's involvement with the neo-Confederate movement, racists and extreme rightists goes way back, Salon.com, December 12 2002.
- Bloggers Catch What Washington Post Missed, The Guardian (UK), Saturday, December 21 2002.
- Katrina Weighs on Lott’s Decision-Making, Roll Call, September 15, 2005 (subscription required).
- Lott to run again for Senate, CNN, Wednesday, January 18, 2006.
| Preceded byWilliam M. Colmer | United States Representative for the 5th Congressional District of Mississippi 1973 – 1989 |
Succeeded byLarkin I. Smith |
| Preceded byBob Michel | House Minority Whip House Republican Whip 1981 – 1989 |
Succeeded byDick Cheney |
| Preceded byRobert Dole | Senate Majority Leader 1996 –January 3, 2001 |
Succeeded byTom Daschle |
| Preceded byTom Daschle | Senate Minority Leader January 3, 2001–January 20 2001 |
Succeeded byTom Daschle |
| Preceded byTom Daschle | Senate Majority Leader January 20, 2001–June 6, 2001 |
Succeeded byTom Daschle |
| Preceded byTom Daschle | Senate Minority Leader June 6, 2001–December 20, 2002 |
Succeeded byBill Frist |
| United States Senate majority leaders | ||
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| Mississippi's current delegation to the United States Congress | |
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| Current United States senators | ||
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| President: ▌ Kamala Harris (D) ‧ President pro tempore: ▌ Patty Murray (D) | ||
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