Payback Time for Lott?

By DOUGLAS WALLER

Nine months after being forced to step down as Senate majority leader, Trent Lott is back. And he's taking swings at George W. Bush, the President whose strong condemnation of Lott's racially insensitive remarks at the late Strom Thurmond's birthday party helped precipitate Lott's demotion. In June the Mississippi conservative voted against a Medicare prescription-drug bill the President had urged Republican Senators to support. Earlier this month he publicly warned Bush that he had to give Americans more details on postwar-Iraq plans. And last week he joined Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan in a resolution to overturn another White House--backed measure, the Federal Communications Commission's decision to relax media-ownership caps.

"He has really found his niche," says a friend. "He recognizes you don't have to have the top power seat in the Senate to be extremely powerful." Lott has breathed life into the dormant Senate Rules and Administration Committee, whose chairmanship he got as a consolation prize after being deposed. He has used the panel to explore such politically sensitive proposals as changing the Senate's filibuster rules and the laws on presidential succession. And he could become a pest when Bush seeks approval for his $87 billion request for postwar Iraq. While Lott has told Bush aides he will support the request, he says, "I don't like this kind of huge expenditure. They've got to explain it better."

Lott insists that his pokes at Bush aren't payback. "Look, I'm here," he told TIME. "And I'm going to try to be helpful. Sometimes that will get me crossed up with the Administration." But he added, "I am sending the signal that they're going to have to deal with me, and they need to keep that in mind, because I can be a problem." The Senator could settle some scores in the fall of next year, when his memoirs are scheduled to be published. The book will include a chapter on Republican Senators (he won't reveal any names yet) who "took advantage" of his misstep to force him out, as well as on Administration officials who were "undermining me." --By Douglas Waller