Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day: The Real Deal on How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Other Washington Barbarians Are Bankrupting America by Joe Scarborough

Author:Joe Scarborough [Scarborough, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social History, Political Science, World, History, Politics, General
ISBN: 9780061753312
Google: COTnBqP-LGgC
Goodreads: 10773384
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Becoming

the Imperial Congress

THREE YEARS BEFORE George W. Bush’s election to the White House, Republican mavericks still struggled to stay true to ideals that had gotten them elected to Congress in 1994. By the summer of 1997, GOP leaders and the young members who had put them in the majority had little use for one another. With the atmosphere filled with such poisonous air, I walked into Senate majority leader Trent Lott’s office to face off on a local military issue. But the conversation quickly turned to national topics. Despite the fact that Lott and I shared the same party affiliation, the same ideological background, and hailed from culturally identical districts, there was little camaraderie by the time I visited his spacious leadership office overlooking the Washington Mall. Florida senator Connie Mack expected my meeting with Lott to go so poorly that he even agreed to sit in as a referee. Mack, though, quickly realized he should have let me walk into this lion’s den alone.

“Scarborough,” Lott began, “you play music, don’t you, boy?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

“Well, I play a little music myself. Got a group called the Singing Senators—maybe you’ve heard of them.”

“I have,” I said, as my smirk broke into a smile.

“Well, Joe, what would you call it if a drummer was playing off one piece of music, a guitarist was playing something else, the bassist was doing his own thing, and the singer was off singing whatever the heck he wanted to sing? What would you call that?” Lott demanded.

“Jazz?”

Connie Mack slumped in his chair.

“No, boy! You’d have chaos! And that’s exactly what you and your friends are causing over in the House going after Newt the way you are. Y’all keep forgetting we’re all on the same team.”

But by the time of our little meeting in 1997, we all were definitely not on the same team. Leaders like Lott and Gingrich were charged with running the Senate and House chambers efficiently even if that meant busting budget caps by billions of dollars to avoid another government shutdown. Trent Lott did his job as well as anyone, so the Mississippian majority leader kept his position until the White House threw him overboard during a phony race scandal that arose in December 2002. Lott was blasted by the press as a bigot for saying America would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, and his days as Senate leader were numbered. Thurmond, who was celebrating his one-hundredth birthday on the occasion of Lott’s speech, had been a champion of racial segregation throughout his 1948 “Dixiecrat” campaign against Harry Truman.

The press immediately seized on the Mississippi senator’s unfortunate offhanded remarks, and liberal commentators who had long suggested that Republicans like Lott owed their positions to a racist “Southern strategy” devoured the majority leader in a feeding frenzy. Lott will tell you that frenzy was fed by a White House more interested in playing to the liberal press than showing loyalty to their Senate majority leader.

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