A One-Man Earthquake

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None of which suggests that things will be easy for Daschle, who understands better than almost anyone else that Senate leadership is an oxymoron. His new job will be the second hardest in Washington. "It's still the same 100 people. You still have the close division of parties and philosophies, so I don't think anything becomes easier," he told TIME. "The only thing that radically changes is who sets the agenda."

If Daschle cannot dictate how the Senate will work, he and his committee chairmen will have the power to decide which bills reach the floor. He can force the debate to happen on his terms, at least in his half of the Capitol.

That reality was already sinking in during final negotiations over the tax bill, which emerged from the House-Senate conference late Friday night and passed in both chambers Saturday. Business lobbyists had been relatively restrained in trying to wedge special breaks into Bush's big tax cut, in part because the White House was promising there would be more to come. But with the realization that this could be their last big meal for a very long time, the grocery-store owners whose priority is eliminating the estate tax were elbowing the brokerage firms that wanted to preserve provisions that give greater incentives for retirement savings. That was a prelude to what will happen later this year, when the Senate Democrats' spending priorities collide with the House Republicans' dreams of smaller government.

The first new business to come up after the Memorial Day recess, Daschle vows, will be the patient's bill of rights--not the version Bush touted as a compromise, but the one Daschle wants, which gives patients vastly greater leeway to sue their HMOs. After the Senate passed the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform bill in April, Lott refused to send it to the House. Daschle told TIME, "I'll hand-deliver it if I have to."

His new committee chairmen will take their shots as well. Bush's missile-defense proposal is likely to look a lot different once it goes through a panel headed by chairman Carl Levin, a leading skeptic. At Commerce, South Carolina's Fritz Hollings will put a shoulder to Bush's deregulatory push. While Democrats as a first gesture of conciliation dropped their efforts to stall the nomination of Solicitor General Ted Olson, Bush's more controversial judicial nominations may die in Leahy's Judiciary Committee--or be euthanized before they get there. On Saturday, for example, the New York Times reported that California conservative Chris Cox asked Bush not to nominate him to the federal bench because the confirmation fight would now be too bloody.

Though all it took was one Senator to fracture the landscape in the capital, it will take everyone to put it back together. On Wednesday, Daschle called Bush, and the two men spoke for the first time since March. "He expressed his congratulations, and we talked about attempting to set a new tone and attempting to work together constructively," Daschle said. "It was a very nice conversation." And it may have been a start. Thanks to a stern, quiet man named Jeffords, Bush may finally have the opportunity to create the kind of Washington he promised last fall.

--With reporting by James Carney, John F. Dickerson, Sally B. Donnelly, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington