Trent Lott bails on sinking Republicans

November 26, 2007

Republican senator Trent Lott intends to resign by the end of the year and become a lobbyist.

By leaving before the end of 2007, it immunizes Lott against tougher restrictions in a new lobbying law that takes effect at the end of the year. That law would require Senators to wait two-years before entering the lucrative world of lobbying Congress, according to the Associated Press.

Lott decided to run for a fourth Senate term in 2006 for reasons including representing Mississippi and the Gulf Coast region in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Trent Lott is serving in his fourth term in the U.S. Senate.

Lott, 66, served as Senate majority leader when Republicans controlled that body but was pushed out of the leadership post after he told a 2002 birthday gathering for former Sen. Strom Thurmond that the country would have avoided "all these problems" if Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential bid had succeeded.

Lott later apologized for his "poor choice of words."

Before his tenure in the Senate, Lott represented Mississippi for 16 years in the House of Representatives.

Racist questions follow Lott

As a Congressman, he voted against renewal of the Voting Rights Act, voted against the continuation of the Civil Rights Act and opposed the Martin Luther King Holiday.

Lott also maintained for many years an affiliation with the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is described as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Lott hosted Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) leaders, an American "paleoconservative" political organization that supports a large variety of localized grassroots causes including white separatism, at his Senate office in 1997 and addressed its events at least three times in the 1990s. As a keynote speaker at a 1992 CCC convention, Lott heaped praise on its members: "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy... Let's take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries!"

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