Senate Majority Leader Quotes
Trent Lott was the Senate Majority Leader and at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party made a speech that the country would have been much better off had Strom been elected President when he ran as a 3rd party candidate on a program of legal segregation and racism. Few of the major media reported on this, but Conason and few others published it on the Internet, some TV stations picked it up, and soon the major media were all writing or broadcasting about it. Lott was forced to resign as Republican Majority Leader.
The ad was prepared by American Renewal, the political lobbying wing of the FRC. This quotation would be typical of the political technique of using the most tenuous, remote connection between a politician of the opposing party and a really evil world villain that was so commonly used by conservative politicians at the time. However, what makes the quotation even more noteworthy is that there is an equally tenuous connection between the Family Research Council's Focus on Families as defined in its charter and the subject of the ad–drilling for oil in the environmentally fragile areas of the Anwar of Alaska. Some of the FRC officials justify their getting into this issues as the drilling could help the economy and that will create jobs and then families will have more resources to spend for nutrition, education, health care etc. With that logic, there is nothing in politics that would be beyond their purview so why have a charter and a mission at all?
Explaining his success as Majority Leader:
They were discussing the Civil Right Bill of 1964 which they all wanted to pass. See {605438} . However, they faced a filibuster from the Southern Senators who had always before used this tactic and blocked Civil Rights legislation. However, the President here committed himself to the one way to take most of the power out of the filibuster. Accept a shutdown of the Senate, give up the rest of the President’s legislative program but the filibuster blocks all legislation that the Southerners wanted like cotton and tobacco subsidies.
