Senate GOP looks to Frist to repair Lott damage
WASHINGTON (AP) – Republicans are counting on Sen. Bill Frist to project the image of a party open to minorities as they prepare to take control of the Senate and confront a host of difficult issues. The 50-year-old Frist, a wealthy heart surgeon with relatively little national exposure, was set to be elevated by his colleagues Monday to the position of majority leader in the new Congress.
“He personifies not just the rhetoric about idealism but as a life that has been lived,” Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., said Sunday on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “There are actually hands-on examples of how he will make a difference. And I think it’s a very exciting prospect.”
Frist is considered an authority on health issues in the Senate. He still keeps his starched white lab coat in the trunk of his car, makes monthly visits to hospitals and clinics and goes on occasional overseas medical missions. When the anthrax scare surfaced on Capitol Hill last year, he worked to calm his colleagues.
Senate Republicans coalesced around Frist in the wake of a furor that forced Senate Republican leader Trent Lott to relinquish that job. A Monday afternoon conference call among the GOP senators was planned to seal Frist’s promotion.
Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said Frist would be elected – “I suspect unanimously” – by the 51 GOP senators in the conference call. Frist would become majority leader when Republicans take control in the new Congress that convenes Jan. 7.
Lott, a 61-year-old Mississippian, announced Friday that he would step down in the wake of severe political repercussions over his racially insensitive remarks earlier this month at a birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C.
Frist will “be a different face than what we’ve had,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, told ABC’s “This Week.” “I’m not criticizing what we’ve had, but I think Bill has a kind of a more moderate record and a more moderate approach toward things, and I think that it’s going to be very difficult to criticize him.”
“I think every Republican is working hard to try and be good to minorities and do what’s right. We can’t support some of the far-left, you know, extreme approaches toward race, but we certainly do believe in equality,” Hatch added.
Lott’s praise of Thurmond’s 1948 pro-segregation presidential campaign had put the GOP on the defensive. In his first public remarks since resigning, Lott told The Associated Press on Sunday that he had fallen into a trap set by his political enemies and had “only myself to blame.”
“There are some people in Washington who have been trying to nail me for a long time,” Lott said in an interview outside his home in Pascagoula, Miss. “When you’re from Mississippi and you’re a conservative and you’re a Christian, there are a lot of people that don’t like that. I fell into their trap and so I have only myself to blame.”
Republicans played down the damage of Lott’s words. “In the long sweep of American history, this is going to be a blip,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Lott will remain in the Senate, but not in a leadership role. Republican sources said it appeared that Lott, a senator since 1989, had waited too long to end the controversy and lost any leverage he might have had to cut a deal to become a committee chairman.
“There is no apparent position of influence to which we can elect him,” McConnell said. “He will, in my view, have enormous influence as someone who knows a lot about how the Senate works.”
The Lott controversy may have a direct influence on the president’s judicial picks, Hagel suggested.
One test could come soon: Bush’s possible renomination of U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering for a federal appeals court seat.
Hatch said he thinks Bush should again submit the nomination, which was defeated by a party-line, 10-9 vote in the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee in March.
Pickering, a Mississippi friend of Lott, was opposed by civil rights groups, which accused him of racial insensitivity.
“He was very badly treated before the United States Senate,” Hatch said.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who becomes the committee’s ranking Democrat, told ABC, “I’d vote against him.”