roanoke.com Real Politics / Preston Bryant

DEC. 16, 2002

Trent Lott must resign as majority leader

Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

Trent Lott cannot be an effective majority leader in the U.S. Senate. He must resign his Republican leadership position.

The Mississippi senator, as we all know, said about 10 days ago that had the rest of the nation followed his state’s lead in supporting Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat campaign for president – the basis of which was purely segregationist – then “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Thurmond, a South Carolinian, racked up 87.2% of the Mississippi vote that year.

A firestorm of criticism has engulfed Lott since he made those remarks at a Capitol Hill party celebrating both Thurmond’s 100th birthday and his Senate retirement. He’s handled it poorly, first saying little, then offering a half-hearted defense and apology, then going into hiding in the Florida Keys, and then offering up a few days ago a fuller and much more sincere apology.

But it shouldn’t have taken him eight days to finally issue the kind of heart-felt apology so many friends and foes alike had been demanding. The criticism continues. And Lott appears to be wounded.

As incoming majority leader, Lott will be charged with three things: organizing his Republican Senate caucus, pushing President Bush’s agenda, and working to elect more Republicans to that august body.

Trouble is, while many GOP senators are publicly expressing support for Lott – now that he’s offered a greater explanation and apology for his seemingly pro-segregationist remarks – there is a lot of private head-scratching going on behind closed Capitol Hill doors. And on Sunday, Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma became the first senate Republican to call for a vote in his caucus on Lott’s ability to lead. Nickles is currently the assistant Republican leader.

Bush, who strongly denounced Lott’s claim that our country would’ve been better off had segregation been preserved, needs to have strong leadership to pass his jobs-and-growth package in the upcoming Congress to spur the economy to something more than its current 4 percent growth. So much depends on Bush’s economic agenda getting through the nearly evenly divided Senate – not the least of which is the president’s own 2004 re-election hopes. Lott cannot provide that leadership.

Bush also has made it clear that he wants to put on the federal circuit and appellate benches conservative judges who will be strict constitutional constructionists. And when it comes to Supreme Court appointments, he’s said that he’ll look to name men and women to the high court whose philosophies are every bit as conservative as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Bush could have as many as three Supreme Court appointments over the next couple of years. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 78, will celebrate his 30th anniversary on the bench in a few weeks. The 82-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens marks his 27th year on the bench this week. And court watchers think Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, 72, might be thinking about retiring to her home in Arizona.

The president has the opportunity to set in stone a conservative Supreme Court for the next couple of decades, longer if he wins again in two years and gets more appointments in his next term.

Who thinks that Lott, as majority leader, can be an effective promoter Bush’s conservative court agenda?

In addition to organizing the Republican Senate and shepherding the president’s policies, the majority leader must be able to hit the stump on behalf of other Republicans. When the new Senate convenes in January, there will be 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and one independent who caucuses with the Democrats. If you’re a Republican, that’s a little too close for comfort.

Virginia’s own Sen. George Allen has been tapped by his fellow Republicans to head the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It’ll be up to Allen to cross the country and recruit Senate candidates who can win, devise strategy, raise money for them, and add padding to the GOP’s razor-thin majority.

There will be six Democratic senators up for re-election in two years who are in states that Bush won by double digits. Three more Democrats are up in states that the president won by single digits. In addition, if South Dakota’s Sen. Tom Daschle retires in order to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, then that seat is entirely in play. Democrats, on the other hand, only have about three Republican senators who might be vulnerable in 2004.

Allen knows that opportunities abound for him to add to the Republican majority in the Senate. And while he has expressed loyal support for the embattled Lott, Allen also knows that he must have a Senate majority leader that he can call on for help, especially in tight races. The tarnished Lott is not that man.

While critics can take issue with some of Lott’s votes over the years, nobody really thinks he is a racist. David Duke is a racist and white supremacist. Lott is no Duke. It also must be acknowledged that Lott has done a lot of good things to raise the standards of black life in America – and especially in Mississippi, where he has championed a lot of workforce and economic development programs and has heavily supported that state’s historically black colleges.

However, despite Lott�s many good works over the years and his four apologies over the past week or so � he�ll be issuing more this week as he gins up his mea culpa PR campaign – he has never said what he meant by “all these problems” that could’ve been avoided if the Dixiecrat Thurmond had won in ’48.

Did he mean the 1954 Brown decision? The Civil Rights Act of 1964? The Voting Rights Act of 1965? What?

A lot of folks – especially the 24-hour cable new media who are keeping vigil on Lott right now – are waiting for this particular question to be answered. The more he’s out there apologizing, the more he’s going to be pressed for very hard answers. And the more deeply into his background the media are going to dig. What else might come up?

Lott for many years has been a party-first kind of guy. The stakes now have never been higher: the president’s agenda, the president’s reelection, and the need to elect more Republicans to the Senate in two years.

It’s time now for Lott to be the ultimate party guy. It’s time for him to step down as majority leader.

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