Trent Lott is behind a move to change the senate filibuster rules that will begin when Congress returns after the Memorial Day Weekend. His purpose? To secure the confirmation of controversial Bush judicial nominee Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

A rules change would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, an unlikely occurrence. GOP leaders also are considering trying to change the filibuster rule from the chair of the Senate, which would require only a simple majority vote to approve if Democrats challenged the ruling. That tactic is known as the "nuclear option." Democrats have warned of "fallout" if Republicans resort to that maneuver.

Pickering was rejected by Democrats on the first go-around because of his perceived racial insensitivities. Our prior coverage of Pickering is assembled here. According to this recent article in Salon, there is new evidence to support the claim of racial insensitivity--and in particular, to support a newer claim that Pickering was not truthful to the Committee during his 2002 confirmation hearing testimony.

Pickering told the Judiciary Committee that he engaged in efforts to better race relations in the 1960's. In 1964, he changed parties and became a Republican. He denied to the Committee that the motive for the switch was "to protest the national Democratic Party's support for civil rights and its attacks on segregation."

The new evidence to show Pickering was being disingenous, at best, and a liar, at worst, comes from newly discovered documents at the University of Mississippi Library, consisting of the files of his former law partner, avowed segregationist J. Carroll Gartin.

Gartin, who as lieutenant governor from 1956 to 1960 and again from 1964 until his sudden death in 1966 was a leading member of Mississippi's notoriously racist Sovereignty Commission.

According to Salon, :

Gartin's papers show conclusively that, contrary to McConnell's description, Pickering himself was one of those "white citizens and politicians who resisted integration and civil rights," not someone working to oppose such forces. Instead of "trying to establish better race relations" in the 1960s, Pickering worked to support segregation, attack civil rights advocates who sought to end Jim Crow, and back those who opposed national civil rights legislation, above all the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Or, in the words of a public statement he signed in 1967, Pickering wanted to preserve "our southern way of life," and he bitterly blamed civil rights workers for stirring up "turmoil and racial hatred" in the South.