{"id":2666,"date":"2002-12-19T00:40:30","date_gmt":"2002-12-19T07:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2002\/12\/lotts-future\/"},"modified":"2002-12-19T00:40:30","modified_gmt":"2002-12-19T07:40:30","slug":"lotts-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/12\/19\/lotts-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Lott&#8217;s future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\tIt looks like Trent Lott has the votes to remain as Senate Majority Leader, in which case the coup attempt by Blumenthal, Marshall, the ardently pro-Israel neocons, clueless blogoholics, et. al. will have failed. So Lott&#8217;s future is his to decide, and he&#8217;s probably ornery enough to remain where he is, at least long enough to rub the noses of his critics in his victory for a while. But supposing he wants to be gracious and let Bill Frist try his hand at the rudder, I&#8217;m guessing he would land as Chairman of the <a href=\"http:\/\/appropriations.senate.gov\/\">Committee on Appropriations.<\/a> The current ranking Reep member is Ted Stevens of Alaska, which may explain his support for Lott remaing Leader. <\/p>\n<p>Appropriations would be a good gig &#8211; it&#8217;s the most powerful committee, and would enable him to reward his friends and punish his enemies. And since pork-barrel Klansman Bobby Byrd will be the Ranking Member and Fritz Hollings is also a member, whatever racism one wants to attribute to Lott won&#8217;t be remarkable in the company he&#8217;d be keeping. A further bonus is that Mississippi is a small and poor state, which won&#8217;t require a lot of pork to satisfy its appetites, leaving some for the rest of the country. <\/p>\n<p>Given Lott&#8217;s nervousness with the media, it would probably be a much more fun gig that his current one. But he needs to time the switch to save face, like anybody would.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It looks like Trent Lott has the votes to remain as Senate Majority Leader, in which case the coup attempt by Blumenthal, Marshall, the ardently pro-Israel neocons, clueless blogoholics, et. al. will have failed. So Lott&#8217;s future is his to decide, and he&#8217;s probably ornery enough to remain where he is, at least long enough &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/12\/19\/lotts-future\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Lott&#8217;s future&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-H0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2666\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}