THE G.O.P. DEFECTOR: Senator Turncoat Has No Regrets

• Share

Turncoat, hero, ingrate, revolutionary. Folks around Capitol Hill called Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords a lot of things this year, but as of May 24 there's one thing they couldn't call him: Republican. Jeffords' sudden switch to independent--he saw the G.O.P. moving too far right of his moderate viewpoint--ended the Republican Party's control of Congress. "Democrats got to set the agenda instead of reacting to a Republican President," says a senior Senate Democratic aide. "That is a huge change."

Jeffords says the initial bitterness toward him has cooled among G.O.P. colleagues. "At first," he says. "I was pretty much walled off." And there has been some payback: Republicans undermined a Northeast dairy compact that subsidizes Vermont farmers, and they've refused to add extra money that Jeffords wanted for disabled students in the education reform bill passed last week.

In the immediate post-Sept. 11 world, the President, though, got whatever he asked for. The antiterrorism bill sailed through easily, even though the Democrat-controlled Judiciary Committee was able later to hammer Bush's Justice Department for trampling on civil liberties. Now that the war is abating, Dems are again wielding the bat Jeffords handed them. Last week they beat the G.O.P. to a standstill on the economic-stimulus package. Jeffords, who chairs the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, still believes his decision was right. "I have no regrets," he told TIME. "I accomplished my major goal, and that was to try to make sure that when we did things, we would do them evenhanded, thinking about the people rather than the party."

--Reported by Douglas Waller/Washington