page_title: Trent Lott
section_title: House of Representatives
hierarchical_section_title: Trent Lott / Political career / House of Representatives
caption_attribution_description: English: Senator Trent Lott meets with President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1982.
context_page_description: Chester Trent Lott Sr. is a former American politician and author. A former United States Senator from Mississippi, Lott served in numerous leadership positions in both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. He entered Congress as one of the first of a wave of Republicans winning seats in Southern states that had been solidly Democratic. Later in his career, he became Senate Majority Leader, and, alternately, Senate Minority Leader. In 2003, he stepped down from the position after controversy due to his praising of senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat presidential bid. His praise of the segregationist campaign was perceived to be racist.
  From 1968 to 1972, Lott was an administrative assistant to Representative William M. Colmer of Mississippi, who was also the chairman of the House Rules Committee. Upon Colmer's retirement, Lott won Colmer's former seat in the House of Representatives. In 1988, Lott ran successfully for the U.S. Senate to replace another retiree, John C. Stennis.
context_section_description: He served as administrative assistant to House Rules Committee chairman William M. Colmer, also of Pascagoula, from 1968 to 1972.
  In 1972, Colmer, one of the most conservative Democrats in the House, announced his retirement after 40 years in Congress. He endorsed Lott as his successor in Mississippi's 5th District, located in the state's southwestern tip, even though Lott ran as a Republican. Lott won handily, in large part due to Richard Nixon's landslide victory in that year's presidential election. Nixon won the 5th district with an astonishing 87 percent of the vote; it was his strongest congressional district in the entire nation.
  Lott and his future Senate colleague, Thad Cochran (also elected to Congress that year), were only the second and third Republicans elected to Congress from Mississippi since Reconstruction (Prentiss Walker was the first in 1964). Lott's strong showing in the polls landed him on the powerful House Judiciary Committee as a freshman, where he voted against all three articles of impeachment drawn up against Nixon during the committee's debate. After Nixon released the infamous "smoking gun" transcripts (which proved Nixon's involvement in the Watergate cover-up), however, Lott announced that he would vote to impeach Nixon when the articles came up for debate before the full House (as did the other Republicans who voted against impeachment in committee).
  Lott became very popular in his district, even though almost none of its living residents had been represented by a Republican before. As evidence, in November 1974, Lott won a second term in a blowout. Cochran was also reelected in a rout; he and Lott were the first Republicans to win a second term in Congress from the state since Reconstruction. They were among the few bright spots in a year that saw many Republicans turned out of office due to anger over Watergate. Lott was re-elected six more times without much difficulty, and even ran unopposed in 1978. In 1980, he served as Ronald Reagan's Mississippi state chairman. He served as House Minority Whip (the second-ranking Republican in the House) from 1981 to 1989; he was the first Southern Republican to hold such a high leadership position.
caption: Lott with President Ronald Reagan in 1982
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