In all the hoo-hah over his recent defection, no one has thought to welcome Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords to the ranks of the Independents. Let me be the first to say "Welcome Senator Jeffords!" We’ll save a formal welcoming speech for the convention, if we can ever decide on a place for one. There’s a lot of us Independents, but we’re not what you’d call real well-organized.

While Jeffords is nominally an independent, he’s announced that he’s going to line up with the Democrats on "organizational issues", including those all-important committee chairmanships. Therefore, the question on everybody’s mind after Jeffords dropped his bombshell is: "who lost the Senate"? As is so often the case, the answer is: a lot of people.

President Bush has tried to downplay the significance of Jefford’s leaving the Republican party, saying: "I don’t want anyone to misundertake our admirization for Senator Jefferson. But this isn’t as devastational as some people make out. Our heart will go on."

Bush the Younger, however, bears a fair amount of the blame. When Jeffords tried to pare down the size of Dubbya’s tax cut and funnel more money to special education programs, the President and his men tried to strong-arm him. First, they failed to invite Jeffords to a ceremony honoring a teacher from Jeffords’ home state of Vermont as Teacher of the Year. While that was a petty and calculated insult, it seems like a pretty bad reason to bolt the party. The hardball, however, went beyond that. The White House reportedly threatened to side with Senators calling for the repeal of the Northeastern Dairy Compact, which meant that Vermont s Dairy industry would pretty much take it in the shorts.

In the final analysis, however, it was more than petty insults and threats of political payback on the part of the White House that drove Jeffords away. As he put it: "Looking ahead I see more and more instances where I will disagree with the President on very fundamental issues: the issues of choice, the direction of the judiciary, tax and spending decisions, missile defense, energy and the environment".

I know how he feels. I’m often tempted to vote Republican, especially around tax time. But every time we put them in office because we want them to cut taxes and spending, they immediately get up to the usual mischief of meddling with people’s private lives and fattening the wallets of their oil-industry buddies. Add to that the fact that the party increasingly seems to be run by a cadre to who seem to define a "moderate" as someone who doesn’t picket the funerals of gay people and doesn’t advocate the death penalty for nurses in family-planning clinics. The party of so-called "compassionate conservatism" seems to regard any concession beyond that as "liberalism", or if they’re feeling particularly nasty, "Ted Kennedy liberalism." (After reading some of the anti-Kennedy diatribes in this paper, I’m always startled when I see a photograph of Senator Kennedy and realize that he doesn’t actually have horns and a tail.) As Ronald Reagan once said about his leaving the Democrats, he didn’t leave the party; the party left him.

Of course, for a lot of us, the Democrats don’t offer much in the way of alternatives. Those of us who are uncomfortable with the Religious Right intruding into our private lives are not exactly happy when nannycrats like Joe Lieberman try to dictate what we can watch on TV and then threaten to withhold Federal Highway Funds in order to strong-arm the states into banning cell-phone use.

Where do you go, if, like me, you’re pro-choice, but don’t have any problem with parental-notification laws that require the same level of parental involvement and consent for an abortion as is required for a child getting her ears pierced? Where do you go if, like me, you don’t want to see handguns banned outright, but wouldn’t have any problem with at least the level of licensing and registration for a deadly weapon as is required to drive a car? You end up exactly where Jeffords and I are: Independents.

Will Jeffords be the last of the defectors from the ranks of GOP Senators? Maybe not. Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island has complained that he feels like a "minority in his own party." Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, a close friend and fellow Republican, said after meeting with Jeffords that she "shared some of his legitimate grievances and concerns." Then of course, there’s the most visible GOP outsider, Arizona’s John McCain who, when asked what other members of the Republican caucus were saying, joked "You think they talk to me"?

They’d better. Hopefully, this will serve as a reminder to the Republican conservatives that their party barely won the election in the first place, so a little humility might be in order. Perhaps a little–dare we say it–moderation?

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.