WASHINGTON - With or without Trent Lott as Senate majority leader, the Republican Party will head into the next session of Congress seriously on the defensive in the broad field of civil rights.
The Democrats, aware of the vulnerability of the opposition party as a result of Mr. Lott's mindless praise of the South's segregation years, will be pressing legislation to test the sincerity of Mr. Lott's epiphany on the issue and his party's willingness to acquiesce in it.
In the vanguard of this effort to put civil rights litmus tests on the agenda will be the Congressional Black Caucus, which already is planning to seek a formal censure of Mr. Lott.
Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, dean of the caucus, is pushing a bill that would restore the right to vote to convicted felons after incarceration. It will be only one of a number of such measuring sticks of conservative Republican conversion on the issue of minority rights.
According to David Bositis, senior analyst for the Joint Center for Political Studies, the leading think tank on minority voter politics, 13 states practice felon disenfranchisement, with a current prison population, largely in the South, that is 54 percent African-American.
In the same vein, Mr. Bositis says, other related matters such as jail sentencing with "a very clear racial impact" will be pushed onto the 2003 congressional agenda, with an awareness of the climate created by the Lott fiasco.
The Mississippi senator's foot-in-mouth attack has already invited conspicuous mischief-making by one black Democratic congresswoman, Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. Although she lost her House seat and won't be in Congress in January, she has called for extension of the Voting Rights Act, which is not up for renewal until 2007.
Mr. Lott's late conversion to the cause of affirmative action as part of his serial apologies poses a particular problem for fellow conservatives in Congress who firmly oppose it on principle.
It also complicates the Bush administration's decision on whether to support or oppose the University of Michigan in the case before the Supreme Court in which the school's affirmative action policy is being challenged.
But Mr. Bositis says it still is unlikely that conservatives in Congress will yield appreciably in their opposition to affirmative action, regardless of how uncomfortable Mr. Lott's switch may make them.
Mr. Bositis says other litmus-test issues likely to be pushed by the Democrats include an increase in the minimum wage and opposition to Bush tax breaks and tax cuts favoring the wealthy and detrimental to low-income minority Americans.
All of these prospective civil rights challenges to the Republicans clearly are in the minds of incumbent and incoming GOP senators as they look to the White House for more than the president's transparent hands-off attitude toward the party's Senate leadership.
Many of them are underscoring what they see as an imperative that the Republicans in the Senate be led, and spoken for, by someone who can articulate a GOP view of civil rights that is forward-looking and in harmony with President Bush's efforts to open the party to minority voters.
Mr. Lott, asked in Mississippi the other day what steps he had in mind to prove his conversion on civil rights, said he favored stronger "community renewal" legislation and the president's "faith-based initiative" benefiting black churches and ministries.
He also said with apparent seriousness that he would back a suggestion that he co-sponsor a resolution "memorializing the upcoming anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation" (in 2012) to show his heart is now in the right place.
But paying homage to Lincoln's abolition of slavery 150 years after the fact hardly will mollify the Democrats, and particularly their black caucus, in exploiting his political gaffe. With or without Mr. Lott in the Senate, the GOP faces a contentious beginning in the new Congress.
Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau. His column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.