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From what I understand, last night Lott all but promised a new "Great Society". Given till January 6 to pander to the left is not a good idea for the GOP. I just heard a snippet by Lil' Tommy Daschle saying something to the effect that "Jellyfish" must act on all this legislation he's proposing if he's truly sorry.

TRANSLATION: The RATS don't want Lott to go anywhere, he's too useful to them now. And that's why he needs to step down, or be pushed if necessary, and it can't wait till January 6.

Yup...you are on the markk there.

And that's why he needs to step down, or be pushed if necessary, and it can't wait till January 6.

It's only January 6 because they've all left town for Christmas. That is when the new Congress starts, and the GOP will be taking this up as first order of business (darn near anyway).

They really aren't waiting. Unfortunately, the calendar is a conspirator for the left in this regard.

In 1908, William Lorimer was elected to the U.S. Senate by the Illinois legislature. Illinois politics were as filthy as ever. That means corruption as well as corrupt tactics. Lorimer -- or his friends -- used the former tactic. His enemies used the latter. The Chicago Tribune ran endless attacks upon Lorimer. The accusations outran the evidence, but by late 1911 it had become a national issue. Finally, the Senate picked it up. Hearings were scheduled.

The President, WH Taft, refused to get involved. He called it a Senate matter, and, besides, there was no proof as yet. The former President, ever adept at punching men of straw, jumped all over Lorimer. Roosevelt engineered a luncheon at which he and Lorimer were both to attend, then made a dramatic refusal to be in the same room as the man. Roosevelt's reformer allies, such as Gifford Pinchot and Francis Heney, took the crusade national. They gave speeches, wrote editorials, and endlessly needled Lorimer voodoo dolls

Into the 1912 election, the volume was reaching peak. The Senate hearings revealed that, in and out of contradictory witnesses and evidence, something ugly went on with the Legislature, but there was no evidence that Lorimer was directly involved. Pinchot, Heney, and Roosevelt turned Lorimer into a campaign issue, and tried to lay him in Taft's lap. "The bosses" was all we heard, a platitudinous, sweeping accusation much like today's reactionary use of the word "racism." Roosevelt, of course, used "bosses" mercilessly in the Spring Republican primaries. When confronted with it, he said that there were "good bosses" and there were "bad bosses." The good ones were his. Then, it got worse. Lorimer was a Catholic. Insidious hints at Vatican control threw the whole issue into a true frenzy.

Taft stood back from it, receiving vitriol from one side that he supported Lorimer, and thereby the Pope, and from the other, taking violent hits saying he wasn't defending the Catholic church. In his private letters he told everyone to scr*w off. In public, he kept distant. The fuse hit the bomb at the Republican convention in June, 1912. While the regular party man, Senator Bradley stood on the platform, Francis Heney, leading the Roosevelt crowd, shouted, "Did you vote for Lorimer?" Bradley stalked across the platform, pointed his finger at Heney, and shouted, "Yes, I voted for Lorimer, and when I did I voted for a man ten thousand times better than you. And the time shall never come when the great State of Kentucky will fall so low as to take moral advice from Francis J. Heney." A reporter noted, "All the uproar that had preceded this looked like a prayer meeting compared with what followed." Ten minutes passed before calm was restored.

The Roosevelt reformer crowd, the progressives, lost their head in "reform." They anointed themselves judge and jury of right and wrong. In the Senate, there was little to defend of Lorimer. Democrats would vote against him just to damn a Republican. Progressive Republicans voted against him because he represented the old time machine, which they wanted to replace with their own machine (by this time, Senator Robert La Follette had a well-run machine in Wisconsin and other north border states). Republican regulars had no love for Lorimer, but they hated his accusers more. The Senate voted to annul Lorimer's election, thus tossing him out.

It can be said that the pressure put on Lorimer by the Tribune, Roosevelt, and others led to his expulsion, which was the just outcome. It cannot be said that he would not have been expelled without that pressure. Hysteria is often its own child; it is always unnecessary. Taft, for example, would have come out against Lorimer had doing so not empowered his enemies. Because of their hysterical attacks, Taft had to sit back. He could neither defend nor attack Lorimer. The strategy worked for him, as he made out unscathed.

Definitively, had the Senate expelled Lorimer more quickly, the issue would not have gone away. I think it wouldn't matter either way. Notably, by banding together in defense of Lorimer, the regular Republican Senators were able to more firmly control their local machinery, something that was hugely important at the Republican convention. Had they abandoned Lorimer to his enemies, they might have also abandoned their own base to their own enemies.

These scandals are ever tricky, and no two are the same. The constant is the hysteria. The other constant is that ambitious accusers empower the defense. Our current scandal is being driven by the politically ambitious, and all it does it piss off the reasonable. My dear, loving, leftist parents, (modern) Democratic to the bone, think it's the stupidist thing they've ever heard. They don't care about Lott, but they don't want to see him fall to Jesse Jackson and the Washington Post, who've both done more these past two weeks to raise my parents' eyebrows than ever before.

In your post #25, you question if Lott will not now have to give himself to the opposition cause. The larger question, I think, is what does Lott personally and the Senate in general owe the President after all this? I'm hoping for a bunch of rides for Lott on Air Force One over the Holidays.

A lesson from the Lorimer affair is that hysteria and hysterical over-reaction to it often leads to stupid laws. The Lorimer affair was a driving force behind the 17th Amendment. It did not start it, it propelled it. Most unfortunate.