Captain's Quarters has no hesitation in endorsing Lamar Alexander for the position of Minority Whip in the next session of the Senate. While I have regard for Senator Alexander, this decision has far more to do with his competition than with the Tennessean himself.

Opposing Alexander is none other than Trent Lott from Mississippi. Lott had been Majority Leader until an unfortunate remark at Strom Thurmond's birthday party caused a political firestorm. That's not the problem with his candidacy for Whip; he's been punished for his carelessness in hailing Thurmond's Dixiecrat presidential run. My opposition comes from Lott's attitude towards pork, and especially his attitude about the people who oppose pork spending.

One of the major legislative reforms that came out of the last session of Congress was the Coburn-Obama spending database. Bill Frist managed to expertly get that through in the last days of the legislative calendar. However, that dextrous performance only became necessary because Trent Lott used an arcane Senate rule to kill the database back in March. Tom Coburn and Barack Obama offered the database in an amendment to a lobbying reform bill under consideration, and he invoked Rule 22, which stripped the amendment from the bill for its supposed irrelevance to lobbying reform.

This naturally inspired a lot of criticism from the blogosphere, which has focused on earmarks (especially secret earmarks) as a point of entry for corruption in Congress. In response to this criticism, Lott told an AP reporter that "I'll just say this about the so-called porkbusters. I'm getting damn tired of hearing from them."

Memo to Senator Lott: porkbusters are taxpayers, and we have every right to question how our money gets spent. The fact that the question came in response to a $700 million project to relocate rail tracks in Mississippi that we had just spent $300 million repairing makes the point even more clear. Lott belongs to a generation of politicians that believe that they are above the criticism of their constituents, and that we should just shut up and let our betters decide what to do with us.

Republicans need to show that they have learned a lesson from their midterm drubbing. They lost their majorities because voters perceived that they had lost touch with the electorate on policy as well as attitude. We sent Republicans to clean up Congress, not to clean up for themselves in porkfests that rival anything that came before them. Trent Lott represents the worst of that class, and the mere idea that he remains in consideration for a leadership position after his commentary this year proves that the GOP hasn't listened hard enough.

If the Senate Republicans want us to take them seriously, then they need to send Trent Lott to the back bench where he belongs. Any Republican Senator who supports Lott in leadership needs to have their head examined.

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