Opinion: The president and Lott's protege

President Bush discreetly helped to jettison Trent Lott as Senate Republican leader last month after the controversy surrounding the Mississippi senator's record of racial insensitivity made him a political liability. However, the president hasn't discarded the decades-old "Southern strategy" that Lott has come to represent. That much was made clear this week, when the president -- against the advice of many Republican congressional leaders and officials in his own Justice Department -- renominated Mississippi trial Judge Charles Pickering, a political protege of Lott's, for a federal judgeship.

Last year, well before Lott got himself into trouble at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, Pickering already had become controversial. When he was first nominated by President Bush, he failed to win Senate confirmation because of concerns about his troubling record on issues related to racial equality.

Pickering's record on those issues is almost identical to Lott's. While Lott was working in the 1960s to keep his college fraternity segregated, Pickering was involved in a more consequential effort to defend a challenge against Mississippi's all-white delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Lott got in trouble in recent years for his involvement with the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is a direct descendant of the white citizens councils that led defiance of civil rights laws in the 1960s and '70s. As a state senator in the 1970s, Pickering worked with Mississippi's Sovereignty Commission, which was the most influential group defending the state's segregationist laws.

Many of the concerns about Pickering stem from his more recent actions as a judge. In its deliberations last year, the Senate Judiciary Committee showed particular concern over Pickering's role in the case of a man convicted of burning a cross at the home of an interracial couple. Pickering maneuvered to reduce the man's sentence and took the ethically questionable step of lobbying the Justice Department on the man's behalf. Constitutional experts differ on the question of whether the burning of a cross on public property, or on one's own property, constitutes protected speech. However, burning a cross on someone else's property is a clear-cut crime that is uniquely linked to the South's shameful history of racial violence and intimidation.

By renominating Pickering, the White House reopens all the questions it tried to put to rest by helping to remove Lott as Senate Republican leader. A month ago, while Lott was still trying to hang onto his job, the president had this to say: "Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong." But now, with Lott safely relegated to the back benches, the president has gone out of his way to renominate a judge whose record is as retrograde as Lott's.

The president's support must make Pickering very happy for now. But he should be careful. Lott's experience suggests that the president will tolerate racial insensitivity -- but won't tolerate any public official who becomes a political liability for the White House.

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