Why Trent Lott left the Senate

Speculation is rampant about what caused Mississippi's Trent Lott to up and announce his plans to depart the Senate by the end of the year.

The leading theory -- and one of the best -- is that, for Lott, being in the Senate just hasn't been as fun as it used to be with Republicans out of power and future prospects grim.

The other suspected motive -- put forward by liberal bloggers like Christy Harden Smith at Firedoglake and Ari Berman at The Nation -- is that Lott stands to make a bundle as a lobbyist on K Street, and wants to get out before new lobbying rules go into effect which double the "cooling off" period before ex-Congressfolks can lobby their former colleagues.

Maybe -- although as the Los Angeles Times points out in an editorial today, the new lobbying rules hardly have enough teeth to affect the ability of seasoned deal makers like Lott to buy friends and influence people:

If you think the new ethics law will curb such activities, you haven't been reading the fine print. It's true that the law will ban lawmakers-turned-lobbyists from personal contacts -- letters, telephone calls and meetings -- for two years after leaving office. But nothing prevents them from sitting in a conference room and telling subordinates exactly how to play their former colleagues. True, lobbyists won't be allowed to buy congressmen so much as a $25 lunch. But that's a surmountable problem when they are allowed to bundle millions of dollars in contributions to the lawmakers' re-election campaigns.

Lobbying law or no, Lott will be making millions. That can't explain the sudden departure.

My take: the 2000s have been hard on Lott. The GOP's recent decline in the Senate caps a disappointing five-year run, that started with Lott being outed for waxing nostalgic about the Southern Confederacy in 2002, and seeing his oceanfront home demolished by Hurricane Katrina -- and getting very little help from Washington -- in 2005.

Quite a fall from grace for a man legendary for his political clout and who had eyes on being ringmaster of the Senate. He had enough.

But back to that "innocent and thoughtless remark" Lott made in 2002, when at an event honoring former arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, he declared that our country "wouldn't have had all these problems over the years" if we'd just kept the races separate. In his 2005 autobiography, Herding Cats, Lott was still bitter about the episode -- and his subsequent dethroning as Senate majority leader -- saying Congress had "sunken to a level that really bothers me."

And in a way, he had a point. As I pointed out in an editorial at the time, that wasn't the first time that Lott had revealed his less-than-enlightened views about race in America -- the only difference was that, this time, his Senate colleagues turned on him. But the pattern was always there:

In 1992, Lott was keynote speaker at the Council's national board meeting, ending his speech by enthusing that "the people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy." Throughout the 1990s, Lott maintained his intimate relations with the CCC, hosting a private meeting with Council leaders in 1997, writing a column for the CCC magazine Citizen's Informer for eight years, and attending at least two CCC banquets in his honor.

In a comical and disturbing move, when confronted with evidence of these close associations, Lott claimed he had "no firsthand knowledge" of the CCC. CCC officials curtly responded that Lott was a "friend" and a "paid-up member."

It doesn't stop there. There's also Lott's 1984 address to the Convention of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Biloxi, Mississippi, in which he claimed "the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican Platform." The statement was covered in the winter 1984 issue of the right-wing Southern Partisan magazine, in which Lott also explained that he opposes civil rights legislation, and said that the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday is "basically wrong."

The Jefferson Davis reference was telling. Lott has something of an obsession with the former President of the breakaway Confederate States of America. In the late 1970s, Lott spearheaded a successful campaign to have Davis' citizenship retroactively restored. More recently, Lott fought to gain custody of the desk Davis used during his Confederate reign, so that it could furnish Lott's Senate offices in Washington.

As Lott's "racism-gate" gains steam, more questionable antics will certainly surface. The onset of the Reagan era, for example, seems to have excited Lott's bigoted passions. We know, for example, that at a 1980 Republican campaign rally for Reagan, Lott -- in a statement eerily similar to his "lighthearted" musings last week --announced that if the country had elected the segregationist Strom Thurmond "30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today." The rally and Lott's statement were covered by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger on Nov. 3, 1980, and again by the Washington Post this week.

Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle also highlighted Lott's well-known fight in 1981 to restore the non-profit tax status of South Carolina's Bob Jones University, which the IRS had revoked due to the school's prohibition of inter-racial dating. At the time, Lott issued a "friend of the court" brief arguing that "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy."

It will keep coming -- how he voted to de-fund the Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday commission in 1994 and opposed the King holiday in 1983; how he voted against extending the Voting Rights Act, designed to ensure ballot access for African-Americans, in both 1982 and 1990; on and on.

The pattern is clear: Republican Senator Trent Lott has done more than flirt with racism-it's a long-term relationship. And such a love affair with bigotry is intolerable for one of the most powerful political figures in America.