THE THING TO UNDERSTAND about Trent Lott is that he’s never wanted to be a Senate majority leader like George Mitchell, who mostly obstructed the agenda of a president (George Bush) of the other party. Lott’s style is closer to that of Lyndon Johnson, who as Democratic majority leader in the 1950s worked with a Republican president (Dwight Eisenhower) to achieve mutually beneficial results. In Lott’s mind, his own best days as Senate leader were in 1996 and 1997. Then, while he didn’t quite have a partnership with President Clinton, he worked with the White House and congressional Democrats to enact welfare reform, a telecommunications bill, health-insurance portability, and a balanced budget. Now, Lott “wants to be an accomplishment-driven majority leader who builds in his successes of ’96 and ’97,” says Rep. Chip Pickering, a Mississippi Republican and former Lott aide.
That may happen eventually. But Lott didn’t exactly follow the LBJ formula in producing a bipartisan plan for the Senate trial of Clinton. Instead, he took a long detour. Lott desperately wants an orderly trial in which Republicans will not be embarrassed by having the proceedings terminated at the outset by a simple majority of 45 Democrats and 6 or more queasy Republicans. So over the Christmas holidays he grabbed onto the plan devised by GOP senator Slade Gorton of Washington and Democratic senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. It would have guaranteed a one-week trial and probably no vote at all on the articles of impeachment. And no witnesses would have testified. The White House and Senate Democrats loved the idea, and Lott thought a good number of the 55 Republican would, too.
Yet that plan collapsed, and was replaced by a far better one. How come Gorton-Lieberman died? One reason is an inherent problem in the age of Clinton: This president doesn’t play the game fairly. Lott has made generous concessions to Clinton — a chemical-weapons treaty, a big jump in domestic spending — and gotten very little in return. There’s rarely any Clinton quid for Lott’s quo, and there wasn’t this time either. Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, is also a problem. Normally he’d rather impede Republicans than compromise, but this time he relented. And a third problem for Lott is Senate conservatives. They’ve known all along that Lott, though a conservative, isn’t a partisan conservative leader. Now, they’ve figured out how to thwart him. “You don’t confront him and say, ‘Lott, you’re a jerk,'” a Republican official said. “You quietly work around him to build a firm majority of Republicans in opposition.” And Lott caves. This method allowed conservatives to kill tobacco legislation, campaign finance reform, and a patients’ bill of rights last year. It doomed the Gorton-Lieberman scheme last week.
Lott should have known better than to embrace that plan in the first place. Until recently, he’s relied on an inner circle of a half-dozen advisers, dubbed the Council of Trent, to keep in touch with the sentiments of Senate Republicans. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Spencer Abraham of Michigan, Paul Coverdell of Georgia, Connie Mack of Florida, Gorton — that’s the group. Only Lott doesn’t call on them much anymore, except for Gorton. If he had, he’d have balked at Gorton’s suggestion that his plan was the best Republicans could hope for, both to avoid an embarrassing shutdown of the trial and to protect GOP senators (like Gorton) running for reelection in 2000. Lott did hear Hutchison’s vigorous argument for a full trial with witnesses when the two sat together at the Cotton Bowl on January 1. By then, however, Lott had already begun touting Gorton-Lieberman.
Lott and Gorton operated on two assumptions, one that there will never be 67 votes to convict the president, the other that 51 votes were likely to materialize quickly to shut down any trial at all. In other words, Lott assumed he had a weak hand. In truth, he didn’t. Hutchison wasn’t the only Council of Trent member who wanted a full trial. So did Santorum, who’s up in 2000, and coverdell and Mack. Abraham was conflicted. But the group Lott really misjudged were the GOP moderates, who he thought would be ready to join Democrats and short-circuit the proceedings. Not so. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania spoke eagerly about being a juror in the most important trial of all time. Mike DeWine of Ohio, Susan Collins of Maine, even squishy John Chafee of Rhode Island said no to Gorton-Lieberman.
Meanwhile, Lott was lobbied by both Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and House GOP whip Tom DeLay. Hyde, who heads the prosecution at the Senate trial, called Lott on December 29 when he got wind of Lott’s tentative backing of Gorton-Lieberman. Hyde was upset. The next day, he released a letter to Lott condemning the plan. This upset Lott, who called Hyde on New Year’s Eve to complain testily about Hyde’s making the letter public. DeLay’s advice to Lott turned out to be prophetic: Just hold on and let the process play itself out without much interference. Then, a consensus among Republicans will emerge, as it did in the House in favor of limited hearings and, finally, of impeaching Clinton. Once Lott gave up on Gorton-Lieberman, that’s what happened. Lott, by the way, told Republican senators he’d always preferred what was ultimately agreed on January 8: a full trial with up-or-down votes on both articles of impeachment. Yes, he really had. He just hadn’t believed there were enough GOP votes to ensure it, or that Democrats would ever go along with a GOP blueprint for the trial.
Where does all this leave the notion of Lott as a leader in the style of LBJ? May be intact. Assume Clinton is roughed up in the Senate trial but not ousted, then what? Clinton will be eager for accomplishments to offset the stigma of impeachment. He can’t do that without Lott. And Lott has a House counterpart, speaker Dennis Hastert, who’s probably more inclined to compromise than was his predecessor. Social Security reform. Sweeping tax reform. A ban on partial-birth abortion. Who knows? Lott is interested in his own legacy, too. “If he could combine the accomplishments of LBJ but in a new [and more conservative] direction, that would a be good legacy for him,” says his ex-aide Chip Pickering. Indeed.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
