Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) plans to resign his seat by year's end, a senior Republican official told Politico. The announcement took Capitol Hill by surprise because Lott, the former majority leader, seemed to be relishing his job as minority whip, the second-ranking GOP leadership job. He had regained a post in leadership after he resigned following racially insensitive remarks at a birthday party for the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.).
Something doesn't smell right. Sen Lott (R-MS) was *ultra* unhappy when he got ousted from the senate leadership and took him four years to get back to where he was in 2002. Not just that but he *JUST* got re-elected in '06. There's some idle speculation about he fact that if he retires *this* year he can start lobbying the senate members in one year instead of two, but that's no reason to leave the senate early. Especially after 34 years of service. Anyways Gov Barbour (R) gets to appoint someone to fill out the seat till '08 and then there's a runoff for a seat that ends on 2012. UPDATE: From an old new yorker article I read in a dentist's office:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact_lemann?currentPage=4 I asked Rove if it was true that he had engineered the demise of Trent Lott, of Mississippi, as Senate Majority Leader, and Lott’s replacement by the more Bush-friendly Bill Frist, of Tennessee—it would be hard to find anyone in Washington who believed he hadn’t. (In 1990, Lott publicly criticized President George H. W. Bush for raising taxes, and the Bushes have long memories.) “No,” Rove said, flatly. Then he mentioned, in what I thought was a less than entirely sombre tone, that on the day the Lott affair reached its dramatic peak, when Lott was scheduled to appear on Black Entertainment Television to defend himself, Rove had got a call from his friend Bill Frist: “Monday morning, Frist calls me and says, ‘You know, on Friday we’re supposed to take our boys and go hunting in South Texas together—you think we ought to go?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, let me think about it. Can I call you tomorrow?’ And the next day”—after Lott’s performance on BET, which came across as abjectly liberal, and failed to save him—“I call Frist and say, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be good for you or for me to be seen in South Texas, hunting with our boys.’ I think the world of Bill, but I don’t take credit.” That certainly settles that!
--timball |
