Yesterday, Senate Republicans chose Trent Lott (R-MS) as their new Minority Whip. In 2002, Lott was forced to step down as Majority Leader when “comments he made at former Sen. Strom Thurmond’s (R-SC) birthday party touched off a racially charged controversy.”

At the time, Sen. Charles Hagel (R-NE) said the remark was a “dumb statement” that “raises questions about his judgment.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said Lott needed to “proactively send a message to his colleagues in the Senate and the American people that he is absolutely opposed to any segregation in any form and racism in any form and discrimination in any form.”

What was racism in 2002 is a non-issue in 2006. NPR interviewed several senators — including Hagel and McCain — who said that Lott’s racist comments didn’t even come up in his whip nomination:

Here are the Senate Republicans’ comments from the NPR report:

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

HOST: In that closed room, did anyone mention specifically the Strom Thurmond birthday party incident that led to–

CORNYN: It didn’t come up.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME):

We understand what happened. There’s no point going over. It’s in the past now, you know, and he has expressed, you know, his deep regret, as he should.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ):

I think most people think he paid a pretty heavy price for the mistake that he made. We all believe in redemption, thank God.

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE):

Everyone has an opportunity to rehabilitate themselves if they want to do it, and I admire Trent Lott for coming back and offering himself. The conference spoke, and we go forward.

The Pentagon announced today that 2,200 Marines have been ordered into the Iraqi province of Al-Anbar, “where fierce fighting has claimed at least 21 U.S. servicemembers this month.”

Reacting to the Pentagon announcement, Shephard Smith said “no one should be surprised by any of this” because it “was clear before the election that changes were essential.” But Smith pointed out, “They had to wait until after the election to make changes for political reasons, which I find disgusting.” Watch it:

Full transcript: Read more

“While American commanders have suggested that civil war is possible in Iraq, many leaders, experts and ordinary people in Baghdad and around the Middle East say it is already underway, and that the real worry ahead is that the conflict will destroy the flimsy Iraqi state and draw in surrounding countries,” the Washington Post reports. “The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body,” said one expert.

before heading to prison. Subject line: “My last email for a while.” Abramoff writes that in prison “there is no email. There is no internet access and there are no computers. If I am lucky, I will have access to an electronic, or possibly manual, typewriter, but even that is not certain.” If you’d like to write Abramoff a letter, AP has the details.

So now the leadership lineup, in order, is Pelosi-Hoyer-Clyburn-Emanuel — a fairly fractious crew. One could be of two minds about this. On the one hand, a fairly fractious leadership group might lead to a fractious caucus, creating trouble down the road. More optimistically, the caucus just is diverse in terms of ideologies, constituencies, and personal loyalties. Nevertheless, it’s in everyone’s interest to try and find ways to hang together, rather than separately. Arguably, a leadership team that reflects cleavages that would exist one way or another will be better able to mediate those cleavages and forge a reasonable path forward. After all, though the Pelosi/Hoyer 1/2 punch didn’t look intuitive on paper, it was actually very effective during the minority period.

UPDATE: For a more “sky is falling” take on Pelosi’s missteps here, see Crowley, Zengerle, and Orr. Last night, I was very pessimistic about this (foreseeable) outcome, but Rosenfeld sort of talked me out of being so sure about that. For one thing, as Ezra notes more-or-less this exact same thing happened to the GOP after their 1994 win and the Republican caucus survived and prospered.

I guess the question becomes: Apart from Pelosi looking bad, what concrete problematic things are going to follow from this. In the nightmare scenario, Hoyer decides that if Dems face setbacks in 2008, people will blame Pelosi opening the door for her to be dumped and him to take over as the #1 Democrat and so he deliberately engineers political problems for the Democratic caucus. That, however, strikes me as a more-than-a-bit outlandish scenario. It’s a lot better to be #2 guy in the majority than the #1 guy in the minority so you’d need to be pretty crazy to deliberately risk electoral defeat. As I said above, the Pelosi-Hoyer relationship was already very tense before the election and, in practice, there didn’t seem to be big blowups or obvious problems.