Bush Rebukes Lott
Raising his voice in a growing political controversy, President Bush said remarks by Senate Republican leader Trent Lott about segregation were "offensive" and required the apology he gave.
"Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong," Mr. Bush said to a multiracial audience in Philadelphia, drawing long applause.
"He has apologized and rightly so," Mr. Bush said. "Every day our nation was segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals."
Lott's office immediately issued a statement embracing the president's comments.
"Sen. Lott agrees with President Bush that his words were wrong and he is sorry. He repudiates segregation because it is immoral," Lott spokesman Ron Bonjean said.
Lott ignited a controversy with remarks last week at an event marking Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday. Lott said Mississippians were proud to have voted for Thurmond in 1948. "And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
Mr. Bush was animated as he condemned Lott's original remarks. Audience members, many of them minorities who work in religious groups and charities in inner-city communities across the mid-Atlantic, repeatedly cheered approval of the president's words.
"Recent comments by Sen. Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country," Mr. Bush said.
After Mr. Bush's speech, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the president does not think Lott needs to resign as majority leader.
The Congressional Black Caucus says the Mississippi senator's remarks were "racist" and call for formal censure.
The black lawmakers are citing what they term a "long-standing pattern of behavior" and say it "can no longer be tolerated."
Lott has apologized several times for the birthday party remarks. "Look, you put your foot in your mouth, you're getting carried away at a ceremony honoring a guy like this, you go too far. Those words were insensitive, and I shouldn't have said them," he said Wednesday night on CNN's "Larry King Live" program.
But now attention is turning to Lott's past record on racial issues. While a young GOP congressional leader two decades ago, Lott declared that "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy" as he tried to save the tax exemption of a Christian university that banned interracial dating.
In his 1981 friend-of-the-court filing with the Supreme Court, Lott cited court rulings upholding affirmative action programs at colleges and compared them to the dating ban between black and white students at Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist school.
"If racial discrimination in the interest of diversity does not violate public policy, then surely discrimination in the practices of religion is no violation," he argued, in asking the justices to block the Internal Revenue Service from stripping the school's tax exemption. At the time, he was the Republicans' new whip, the second highest position in the House GOP hierarchy.
A Lott spokesman said Wednesday night that the Senate leader was not endorsing the university's interracial ban when he filed the brief but rather was expressing a "concern that this could create a precedent for all religious schools to lose their tax exempt status."
In addition to the Bob Jones matter, Lott has been criticized for speaking to a far-right white group called the Council of Conservative Citizens, which he has since disavowed, and saying in the mid-1980s that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis" was reflected in the GOP platform.
Some Democrats and black groups, including the NAACP, have called for Lott to step down from his leadership post.
"I simply do not believe the country can today afford to have someone who has made these statements again and again be the leader of the United States Senate," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., one of several potential 2004 presidential candidates to weigh in against Lott.
Kentucky congresswoman Anne Northrup became the first Republican office holder to suggest Lott should step down.
"I've lost confidence in his leadership,'' Northrup told CBS.
Sources have told CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer that influential Republicans - some of them inside the White House - are now urging the President to work behind the scenes to get Lott to step down as Senate Majority Leader.
However, some Republicans rose to Lott's defense. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Lott's comment should be accepted as an "inadvertent slip and his apology should end the discussion."
"I know Trent Lott very well from working with him in the Senate for the last 14 years and can vouch for the fact that he is no supporter of Senator Thurmond's 1948 platform," Specter said.