Senate GOP Picks New Team in Shift to Right

Senate Republicans officially elected a new team of leaders Wednesday headed by Trent Lott of Mississippi, transforming the Senate leadership from the last bastion of the GOP’s pragmatic wing into a well-fortified redoubt of its conservative faction.

A day after Bob Dole resigned from the Senate to run for president full time, Republicans elected Lott to succeed him as majority leader. He won by a landslide margin of 44 to 8 over fellow Mississippian Thad Cochran, an old-school Republican of a more conciliatory bent.

Republicans also elevated two other strident conservatives, choosing Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) to succeed Lott as assistant majority leader and Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) to fill the mid-level leadership post of Policy Committee chairman.

Colleagues predicted that Lott and his lieutenants will be more aggressive and confrontational in advancing the flagging GOP legislative agenda. But Lott insisted that it will be a change of style, not substance.

“The torch has been passed but the flame is the same,” Lott said after he was elected majority leader in a closed-door party caucus. “Our agenda will be the same as the one that Bob Dole laid out for us. We do want to control the size and scope of government.”

Republicans were hopeful that the new team’s conservative cast will help bridge divisions between Senate Republicans and the more conservative House GOP. Indeed, in one of his first initiatives as leader, Lott traveled the House side of the Capitol more than once this week to help leaders there try to quell a rebellion among conservative freshmen opposed to a GOP budget bill.

Lott said that he wants the budget to be his first legislative accomplishment as leader. He also wants a health insurance bill to move quickly, although President Clinton is expected to veto it if Republicans do not make further concessions. Other priorities for the rest of the year, he told reporters, include immigration reform as well as the tax and spending bills needed to carry out the budget resolution.

“I am humbled because I know of the work we have to do,” Lott said in his first speech on the Senate floor as leader.

Absent from his list of legislative priorities, however, was a measure to roll back the gas tax that Dole had made a campaign issue.

Lott’s election as majority leader is the capstone of a legislative career marked by a steady and aggressive advance through the ranks of congressional leadership. During his 16 years in the House, where he was a friend and mentor to Newt Gingrich long before the Georgia Republican became House speaker, Lott rose to the No. 2 post of minority whip. He was elected to the Senate in 1988 and only six years later took the bold step of challenging an incumbent leader to become Republican whip.

He began campaigning among colleagues to become majority leader long before Dole announced that he was retiring from the Senate. When Cochran got into the race, he found many colleagues already committed to Lott.

“I started with a small base of support and during the campaign it got smaller,” said Cochran.

Although the effect of the leadership change was to give the Senate hierarchy a harder-line conservative edge, the outcome was determined by factors unrelated to ideology. In the Senate’s clubby atmosphere, allegiances are determined largely by personal ties and calculations of self-interest.

So, even though Lott is conservative, he won support from most of the Senate’s moderates--including Sens. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), who served with Lott in the House as one of his hand-picked deputies, and James M. Jeffords (R-Vt.), another former House colleague who also sings with Lott in a quartet of senators.

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), asked why he was supporting Cochran, cited mostly personal reasons, including Cochran’s support of Lugar’s 1985 bid against Dole to become the Senate GOP leader.

Whatever senators’ motives were, however, the effect of the balloting was to hand more power to some of the party’s most conservative members.

Nickles is a leading opponent of abortion, a great friend of cutting taxes, a scourge of organized labor, a lawmaker who scored 100% on the American Conservative Union’s 1994 legislative scorecard of key votes. As majority whip, he will be the principal GOP vote counter and enforcer of party discipline.

Craig is a leading ally of the gun-rights lobby and an ardent proponent of amending the constitution to require a balanced budget. He has been chairman of the Senate Steering Committee--a caucus of the Senate’s most conservative Republicans. As Policy Committee chairman, he will help try to build party consensus around key issues.

While Lott is generally seen as more conservative than Dole and cut from the same cloth as Gingrich, he has a penchant for legislative deal-making that sometimes smooths his partisan edge. Within the last few months, he has played a major role in pushing Republicans to resolve their differences and pass telecommunications legislation, the line-item veto and new limits on product liability lawsuits.

“There was a lot of give and take, which I worked at very assiduously,” Lott said. “I didn’t get everything I wanted. But we got all three of those bills through.”

Moderate Republicans said they are not worried that they will get short shrift under the new, more conservative regime. “He’s not going to trample over the moderates,” Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.) said of Lott.