Trent Lott

From Free net encyclopedia

Chester Trent Lott (born October 9, 1941 in Grenada, Mississippi) is a U.S. Senator from Mississippi and a member of the Republican Party.

1 Political biography
2 Controversy and resignation
3 Recent developments
4 2006 re-election campaign
5 Trivia
6 Bibliography
7 External links

[edit]

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 getting his law degree, he moved to Pascagoula (where he still lives today) and began a law practice.

He was administrative assistant to House Rules Committee chairman William 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, covering the southern tip of the state, even though Lott ran as a Republican. Lott won handily. It's very likely that he'd have won without Colmer's endorsement, as this was the year of a titanic Republican landslide which Richard Nixon captured 49 of 50 states and 78 percent of Mississippi's popular vote. He 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. Lott was reelected seven 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. It was clear that 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-Dick Cheney Administration took office and 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.

[edit]

Controversy and resignation

Image:Trent lott.jpg

Tremendous political controversy ensued following remarks Lott made on Dec. 5, 2002 at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. 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, a group widely criticized for segregationist ties.

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 racist 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.

[edit]

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.

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 [1], once Senator Bill Frist retires from the Senate [2].

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.

[edit]

2006 re-election campaign

Template:Main Lott faces no Republican opposition in the race (the filing deadline was March 1, 2006). [3]

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.)

[edit]

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 [4].