November 26, 2007
Lott: 'I Took A Few Licks, I Made Some Mistakes'
UPDATED.
Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, longtime Senate majority leader and current minority whip, said he had no health problems when announcing his early retirement today.
"It is time for us to do something else," he said at a press conference in his hometown of Pascagoula.
The 66-year-old senator denied that he was stepping down early to get a jump on a lobbying career, a lucrative next step for many who leave Congress. Lott handily won re-election last November after previously stating he would not run; he attributed his change of heart to Hurricane Katrina. Today, Lott said that he had accomplished much in that regard but acknowledged that there was more work to do. He expressed confidence that his eventual successor would "pick up the flag and carry on."
"The legislation that we needed for the most part to be put on the books has been completed," Lott said, speaking of post-Katrina reforms. "We feel like it is time now, an opportunity to make this move," he said, speaking for himself and his wife, Tricia.
Lott is stepping down by year's end, leaving it to Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) to appoint a temporary replacement. A special election will be held next year.
According to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Rep. Chip Pickering, a protégé of Lott's, might be a natural pick to fill the senator's shoes. Lott is one of a number of Republican senators heading for the exits next year amid a political climate that does not favor their party.
Lott's departure is also expected to set off a round of musical chairs among the Republican leadership. Sen. Jon Kyl's spokesman confirmed that the current Republican Conference chairman will run to replace Lott as the Senate GOP's No. 2. Minority Chief Deputy Whip John Thune has not said whether he would also pursue that slot, but a source close to the South Dakota senator said Thune plans to run for Kyl's current job as the Senate GOP's No. 3. Thune may find a challenger in GOP Policy Committee Chairwoman Kay Bailey Hutchison, in which event fellow Texan John Cornyn -- Kyl's vice chair -- will seek her current position as the minority's No. 4, a spokesman from Cornyn's office confirmed.
Lott is a career legislator, serving in the House from 1972 until 1988, when he was elected to the Senate. His defeat of Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., for the minority whip position last November was hailed as one of the greater political comebacks in recent memory. In December 2002, Lott was basically kicked out of the majority leader position -- with President Bush's blessing -- after remarks deemed racially insensitive ignited a firestorm.
Lott said he phoned Bush to deliver the news of his retirement yesterday and gave no indication of lingering bad blood. "He was very kind in his remarks," the senator said. "Over the years we've had our ups and downs, good times and bad times, the both of us. He said he felt like I'd be missed in my role as whip."
While Lott appears to have recovered from the moment that threatened his political career four years ago, there's little doubt his remarks will remain an asterisk in his biography. "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it," Lott had said at a birthday party for the former segregationist. "And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
Thurmond by then had reformed his views on race, and Lott protested that he had merely been guilty of "a poor choice of words." Yet the impression of nostalgia for the Jim Crow days stuck, and the Bush administration helped Republicans engineer Lott's eventual resignation from that post.
Asked whether the incident played a role in his decision to step down early, Lott seemed to anticipate the topic would come up. "To me this is a positive event, this is not something that is negative," and it's not "trying to rewrite history," he said of his retirement. "I've been on mountaintops; I've been down in the valleys. We've proven that we are a resilient people," he said, steering the topic back to Katrina. Lott lost his beach house in the 2005 storm.
"I took a few licks, I made some mistakes," he added.
The Beltway was surprised when Lott won back power in last November's leadership elections, but Democrats did not protest very loudly. Lott appears to have fallen back in Washington's good graces for the most part, probably in part because of his advocacy and leadership following Katrina.
Just as former House Speaker Dennis Hastert did when he announced his retirement earlier this month, Lott commented on the hyperpartisan environment in Congress.
"We spend so much time fighting over Iraq... we passed one appropriations bill when we should have done a dozen," he said. "I'm not mad about that or frustrated about it, [but] it's so difficult now to get things [passed] that should be able to pass relatively easily."
Lott would not say what he planned to do next, only that "there are some opportunities out there that I would like to be able to consider." He said he would continue to push for antitrust legislation that would no longer exempt the insurance industry until his last day on the job.
CongressDaily has a retrospective on Lott's career and more on early maneuvering (subscription) for Lott's leadership slot, and The Fix speculates that Lott will actually wait until January to step down in order to keep his seat safe for a GOP candidate.
