Trent Lott is the Senate Republican Leader.
From June 12, 1996, until June 5, 2001, he served as the Senate's 16th Majority Leader, the first Mississippian to hold that leadership post.
In the Senate, Lott serves on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, the Finance Committee, and the Rules Committee.
Lott is serving his third term in the Senate, first elected in 1988. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1972.
In the Senate, Lott has served in the leadership as Secretary of the Senate Republican Conference. In 1995, he was elected Senate Majority Whip. In 1980, he was elected Republican Whip in the House, the second ranking Republican leadership position. The first Southerner to be elected to that position, he was re-elected to the post three times. Lott is the first person to be elected to the position of Whip in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Lott started his leadership service in 1979, when he was elected to chair the House Republican Research Committee, the fifth ranking Republican leadership position in the House.
Lott was born in October 1941, in Grenada County, Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper farmer turned shipyard worker and a school teacher. He received his Bachelor of Science in Public Administration degree in 1963 and his Juris Doctorate in 1967 from the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He began his political career in 1968 as administrative assistant to U.S. Representative William Colmer, D-Miss.
He is married to Patricia (Tricia) Thompson Lott, They have two children and one grandchild.
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