Who is the Senate Minority Whip in Congress?

Answer 1

Ironically enough, Trent Lott is the Senate Minority Whip... here's a little bit of background on him....

Tremendous political controversy ensued following remarks Lott made on December 5, 2002 at the 100th birthday party of Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Thurmond ran for President of the United States in 1948 on the Dixiecrat (or States' Rights) ticket. Lott said:

"When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either."
Thurmond had based his presidential campaign on an explicit racial segregation platform. Many political commentators inferred that because Lott supported Thurmond's campaign, Lott also supported racial segregation. Lott had attracted controversy before in issues relating to civil rights. As a Congressman, he voted against renewal of the Voting Rights Act, voted against the continuation of the Civil Rights Act and opposed the Martin Luther King Holiday. Lott also maintained an affiliation with the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is described as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Lott hosted Council of Conservative Citizens leaders, an American paleoconservative political organization that supports a large variety of localized grassroots causes including white separatism, at his Senate office in 1997[citation needed] and addressed its events at least three times in the 1990s. As a keynote speaker at a 1992 CCC convention, Lott heaped praise on its members: "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy… Let's take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries!"

Lott's attempts to explain the remark grew from a mild dismissal as an off-the-cuff remark supporting Thurmond's national defense platform to an explicit repudiation of his past and assertions of support for affirmative action in a BET interview.

Once reported in newspapers and television, calls for his resignation as majority leader from both ends of the political spectrum grew. Some Democrats and Republicans considered the remark inappropriate. Al Gore called the statement "fundamentally racist." Many conservative groups and media were quick to distance themselves from Lott and criticize the incident. Centrist Democrats and Republicans at first defended Lott, insisting the remarks had been blown out of proportion. Some pointed to Sen. Robert Byrd's past as recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan to suggest a double standard, as Byrd was not forced from his leadership position in the Democratic party. Others saw Lott's remarks as simply an attempt to compliment Thurmond on his 100th birthday, devoid of any real meaning beyond the context.

Under pressure from Senate colleagues, and having lost the support of the White House, Lott resigned as Senate Republican Leader on December 20, 2002. Bill Frist of Tennessee was later elected to the leadership position.

Lott was chosen by his colleagues as Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee after the controversy. Some of his critics for the original remarks have noted that this position still carries a great deal of power, and that conservatives and Republicans were mainly using the whole controversy to get rid of a leader they regarded as weak, particularly in the conduct of the Clinton impeachment trial.

In the book Free Culture, Larry Lessig argues that the resignation of Lott would not have occurred had it not been for the effect of Internet blogs. He says that though the story "disappear[ed] from the mainstream press within forty-eight hours", "bloggers kept researching the story" until, "[f]inally, the story broke back into the mainstream press."

Answer 2

Mississippi Senator Trent Lott. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell is the minority leader

Answer 3

I'm pretty sure it's Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.