The Real Jim Jeffords --The Vermont politician has been backstabbing Republicans for decades.
BY JOHN MCCLAUGHRY
Wednesday, May 30, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
CONCORD, Vt.--James M. Jeffords's departure from the Republican Party concludes his long career of warfare against his own partisan allies. In the 33 years since he was first elected to statewide office in Vermont, he has rarely laid a glove on the opposing party, while repeatedly stabbing his own. Now, no longer a subversive within party ranks, Republicans can know him at last as an open enemy.
Mr. Jeffords's antipathy toward the GOP dates to 1972. As Vermont's attorney general, twice elected statewide, he believed himself to be the presumptive successor to outgoing Republican Gov. Deane C. Davis. The governor and his establishment allies, however, viewed Mr. Jeffords as a demagogic lightweight unfit for serious business. In a contentious primary, Davis's anointee, Luther F. Hackett, prevailed over Mr. Jeffords by 5,421 votes. Democrat Thomas P. Salmon subsequently won in the general election, as Mr. Jeffords and his partisans sat on their hands.
From that fateful primary on, Mr. Jeffords has rarely missed an opportunity to criticize and undermine insufficiently liberal fellow Republicans, a performance punctuated by self-serving election-year appeals for "party unity" and Republican campaign contributions. In his 14 years in the House, and 12 in the Senate, his voting record resembled that of a left-of-center Democrat.
Worse, Mr. Jeffords often acted as if it were compulsory to humiliate his own party's leadership. In 1980, for example, Mr. Jeffords became an active supporter of the GOP presidential candidacy of liberal Rep. John Anderson. After the latter dropped out and became an independent, Mr. Jeffords pointedly refused to support the Reagan ticket. Later, he broke a campaign pledge and became the only Republican in Congress to oppose Mr. Reagan's tax cuts.
Seriously alienated from his national Republican colleagues, Mr. Jeffords decided to return home to run for the governor's chair he felt had been denied to him 10 years earlier. On hearing the news, retiring Gov. Richard Snelling, one of the Davis-Hackett circle of 1972, agreed to run for an unprecedented fourth term, just to keep Mr. Jeffords from becoming the party's nominee. Mr. Jeffords returned to Congress.
In 1985, he denounced the Reagan administration's Central American policy before a "Vermont Walk for Justice and Peace." While Mr. Jeffords stood by approvingly, David Dellinger, one of the Chicago Seven accused of inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, publicly likened Mr. Reagan to Hitler. Two years later, in a move designed to make life difficult for President Reagan, Mr. Jeffords cast the only Republican vote for the Democratic budget resolution. It passed 206-205.
In 1994, in a huge Republican campaign year, Mr. Jeffords was re-elected by seven points over Democrat Jan Backus. His campaign literature omitted "Republican" and stressed "independent." It also boasted well-earned endorsements from the League of Conservation Voters, the National Education Association, and the main public employees union. In the 1990s, Mr. Jeffords moved steadily leftwards. He rushed to co-sponsor Hillary Clinton's health-care scheme, denounced the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas, and voted against a ban on partial-birth abortion, a position so extreme that even his liberal Democratic colleague Patrick Leahy disagreed.
When the impeached President Clinton was tried before the Senate, Mr. Jeffords, sworn as a juror in the case, arranged a private meeting with the defendant "to express his disappointment at Clinton's behavior." Shortly thereafter, he became the first Republican to declare that he would vote to acquit Mr. Clinton on both counts. When he learned of Mr. Jeffords's secret visit to the defendant, House impeachment prosecutor David Schippers remarked that had this been an ordinary criminal trial, juror Jeffords would have gone to jail.
In 2000, a year when voter outrage peaked over Vermont's court-mandated "civil unions" act, Mr. Jeffords had the good fortune to face an openly gay Democrat, state auditor Edward Flanagan. With massive national GOP support, Mr. Jeffords won in a walk.
However, a week before election day, Mr. Jeffords, far ahead in the polls, joined Sen. Leahy and socialist independent Rep. Bernie Sanders in denouncing "divisive rhetoric." This code phrase was a mainstay of the Democrats' constant attack on Republican gubernatorial candidate Ruth Dwyer, an opponent of the civil unions law. The Dwyer campaign promptly began to collapse, and Democrat Gov. Howard Dean was easily re-elected.
The pattern of betrayal has now reached its apogee. With the Senate tied 50-50, Mr. Jeffords at last found himself in a position to do maximum damage to the party whose leadership he has increasingly despised.
In departing the GOP, he portrayed himself as a paragon of Vermont-style independence and conscience. That representation, however, is undermined by the fact that Mr. Jeffords first cut a very smart deal for himself with the Senate's Democratic leadership. Recognizing the possibility that 98-year old GOP Sen. Strom Thurmond might soon be replaced by the appointee of a Democratic governor, thus putting the Democrats in control of the Senate, Mr. Jeffords bargained for and won a committee chairmanship in return for his treason. That deal would allow him to continue as a committee chairman, avoiding the Senate rule that would have required him to step down as Labor and Human Resources Committee chairman at the end of the current Congress.
As damaging as the Jeffords switch is to Republican prospects in Washington, it may turn out to be a blessing for the Vermont Republican Party. Republican members of Congress from Vermont have, in modern times, not generally attempted to influence the state party's position on purely state issues like education finance, taxes, and environmental controls.
When an issue was both state and national, however, Mr. Jeffords has pressured the state party to avoid taking any position that would undercut the position of "our Republican senator." For instance, in 1998, he contrived to invert a party resolution urging him to support Majority Leader Trent Lott's "paycheck protection" amendment to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act. (The resulting resolution praised Mr. Jeffords for his "continuing support" of the Lott amendment, when in fact he opposed it.) He was also successful in burying a state party resolution opposing partial-birth abortion.
Burdened by having to constantly cover for "their" senator, beholden every sixth year to the infusion of "party building" money brought in by Mr. Jeffords to secure his re-election, and restrained by his appeals, and those of his few defenders, the Vermont GOP has developed something of a split personality. Almost every item in a "normal" state Republican platform--tax reduction, free markets, business deregulation, expanded school choice, protection of family and marriage--runs counter to Mr. Jeffords's often extreme anti-Republican positions.
The jolt of his departure should stimulate Vermont Republicans to seize the opportunity to offer a much stronger and forward-looking Republican message to an electorate which last November, thanks to the "civil unions" issue, gave Republicans control of the Vermont House for the first time in 16 years.
opinionjournal.com
Mr. McClaughry, a former Vermont state senator, is president of the nonpartisan Ethan Allen Institute in Concord. |
