"National Review" rejects assertion that the Republican Party is the party of Jefferson Davis, but former U.S. Senator Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) said it was

National Review on their website takes exception to the assertion that the Republican Party is the party of Jefferson Davis. You can read the blog here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/349834/matthews-gop-party-jefferson-davis-andrew-johnson

However, former U.S. Senator Trent Lott, (R-Mississippi), Republican leader in the U.S. Senate, explained in an interview in Southern Partisan magazine that the Republican Party was the party of Jefferson Davis. The interviewer wanted him to explain an assertion which he had made at a national convention of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

This is an extract from page 44 from the Fall 1984 Southern Partisan interview with Trent Lott:

Partisan: At the convention of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Biloxi, Mississippi you made the statement that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican Platform." What did you mean by that?

Lott: I think that a lot of the fundamental principals that Jefferson Davis believed in are very important today to people all across the country, and they apply to the Republican Party. .... After the War between the States, a lot of Southerners identified with the Democrat Party because of the radical Republicans we had at the time, particularly in the Senate. The South was wedded to that party for years and years and years. But we have seen the Republican Party become more conservative and more oriented toward traditional family values, the religious values that we hold dear in the South. And the Democratic party has been going in the other direction. As a result of that, more and more of The South's sons, Jefferson Davis' descendants, direct or indirect, are becoming involved in the Republican Party. The platform we had in Dallas, the 1984 Republican platform, all the ideas we supported there --- from tax policy, to foriegn policy: from individual rights, to neighborhood security --- are things that Jefferson Davis believed in.

Trent Lott wasn't the only Republican U.S. Senator that appeared in the Southern Partisan. There was at least a half dozen.