Opinion on Jeffords switch

[Boondox]

Cowboydoc -- I agree with you on so many issues, but on this one our views differ. Jeffords voted as an American and a Vermonter, not as a politician. And for the past several years it seems like there just just haven't been many Americans in Washington. When the day arrives that you place individuals (even friends) before the people you represent, you have no business holding public office. Also, IMO, going Dem would have been a hurtful act; going Independent was the only ethical choice.

Our famous statesman, Ethan Allen, said it best so long ago: "The gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills."

Pete
Lamoille County
Republic of Vermont

www.GatewayToVermont.com

 

[cowboydoc]

Pete,
Yes I agree with you on principles but he could have done the same thing without leaving the party and throwing it into a mess. I don't see where leaving the republican party to become an independent did anything but give the power of the senate to the democrats. How did that change how he voted or what he did as a senator? That is what I'm having a hard time with is why did he have to leave the party? I don't think that anyone should be allowed to leave the party that they were elected to. I just don't think that is fair. Would he still have been elected if he was an independent? Would he have even gotten the funds to be elected? I do not know the guy or anything but I think it was wrong as it impacted people besides himself. I mean in another year he was going to be up for re-election anyway. I know you know the man but from an outsiders perspective not knowing anything about him at all it seems like a pretty selfish thing to do and it hurt alot of people.

 

[Bird]

I'm with you, Richard. I don't know enough about Jefford's reasons for changing (or know enough about the man otherwise), but I figure he was elected as a Republican and if he wanted to change, he should have announced it when he came up for election again. In other words, I figure he got elected under false pretenses and would hope the voters would kick him out at the first opportunity. And I'd feel the same way about a Democrat who changed to Republican in mid-stream.

Bird

 

[EdDekker]

As an act of principle Jeffords move is questionable. He did not renounce his membership in the Republican party until he had negotiated a deal with the Democrats guaranteeing himself a committee chairmanship.

It looks more like an act of opportunism.

Strom Thurmond is not looking well these days. The Senate was likely to switch to Democrat control within the next year and a half anyway, by acting now Jeffords was able to cut a deal for himself.



As for Jeffords treatment by the Republican leadership, he has been coddled. The Senate leadership blocked a conservative challenge to his Education committee chair in 1997 by Dan Coats. He was given extra spending on his pet projects to buy his support (the New England Dairy Compact, the special education spending in the Bush budget, the Education bill, ….)

The coddling of Jim Jeffords extends back to 1988 when he left his House seat to run for the Senate. The national Republican party supplied Jeffords with campaign support to win the Republican primary over Mike Griffes. This is after Jeffords was the only Republican Representative to vote against Reagan’s tax bill. In fact as a member of the house Jeffords opposed Regan’s agenda more than he supported it.

As a matter party loyalty he was still supported by the national Republicans. Jeffords has offered no loyalty in return.


Jeffords was opposing the president of his party in a critical vote, holding out for special funding on a pet project and reductions in the size of the president’s tax cut. In response he was not invited to a White House photo op. Jeffords has been around Washington long enough to know that opposing a president (of either party) in a major vote will adversely effect invitations to the White House.

There might have been a case for ‘mistreatment’ in an alternate reality, one in which the Republican party officials had recruited a primary challenge to Jeffords in every election year, one in which Jeffords fellow Republican Senators had stripped Jeffords of this committee chairmanship. (I could make such a case for this alternate reality after all he is far left of the Republican mainstream. Comparing American Conservative Union (ACU) and Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) ratings (for 2000) of Jeffords with a Republican Liberal like Olympia Snowe shows Jeffords score 44 points less conservative and 25 points more liberal.)


Last year Jim Jeffords ran for reelection as a Republican. Jeffords openly and loudly supported George W Bush for president. He is now ‘surprised’ that Bush is actually following his campaign promises, and that the Republican Senate leadership was acting on them. (I would like to think that every US Senator is smarter than this.)

If party labels mean anything they should indicate (as an absolute minimum) a commitment to vote for the party in the organizational vote. If Jeffords found the Bush Campaign or even the Republican party platform unacceptable (or in any way questionable) he could have run for office last year as an independent, announcing to his supporters in Vermont that he would reserve his decision on his vote to organize the Senate, possibly voting for Democrat control. He did not. He ran as a Republican, accepted Republican party campaign support, and implicitly made a commitment to vote for Republican organizational control of the Senate.

A close parallel is the example set by Senator Wayne Morse (John Fund does this better than I can. See [url]http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=95000527 [\url]. Morse was a Republican Senator in 1953 who decided he could not continue his membership in the Republican party. In an evenly divided Senate he continued to vote for the Republican party in the organizational vote assuring the Republican party the committee chairs. Morse stated that it would have been dishonorable for him to give control to the Democrats since he ran for office as a Republican.




(Your children will regret that Jeffords was in the Senate (as a Republican and Independent) – he wants to massively increase federal spending, spending all of the surplus. Federal spending will never go down, at best we can hope to slow the rate of increase. With Senators like Jeffords the rate of growth will not drop. Your children will be paying for it their entire lives.)


Ed

 

[cowboydoc]

I must say Dekker you are one well informed gentleman!

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1>Edited by cowboydoc on 05/25/01 07:50 PM (server time).</FONT></P>

 

[DVerbarg]

The post by Dekker expresses most of my thoughts around this topic.

In answer of another post, all committees will be chaired by the democrats (including the Judicial).
The committee chair has the power to set the timetable or schedule of committee. By indefinitely or
repeatedly postponing review of a bill or a vote to release a bill out of committee a committee chair
can effectively kill a bill (sometimes referred to as "pigeonholed"). If a bill has a high enough profile they
cannot effectively pigeonhole the bill so instead they use their majority to change to bill enough that
the opposition will no longer vote for it. If the opposition is desparate enough to get the bill to move
with the language they prefer they make make "deals" to agree to vote for something that someone
else wants. Ahh, the politics of it all /w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif!

I really feel that Jeffords put himself up for auction and the democrats were willing to "pay more" for his vote. "Paying more" includes agreeing more with his ideaology and giving him a chair position in a committee he has strong feelings about (hence the power to advance his agenda/beliefs).

After awhile these Senators and Congresspeople get too used to the system and become corrupted not willing to stand up for what they believe but learn to "work" the system. Makes me think twice about the concept of term limits.

David

 

[Boondox]

Unlike in other states, here in Vermont a candidate pretty much gets elected not on the basis of his or her political party, but on the basis of who they are. Case in point: Bernie Sanders is an Independent rep with virtually no out of state donations to his election, yet he consistently gets reelected by the people of Vermont. Another case in point: a couple of years ago a self-made millionaire with a graduate degree from Harvard -- a man who was in every way professionally qualified for the senate seat he sought -- was absolutely slaughtered by a retired dairy farmer with a grade school education.

We vote for Jeffords the man, not Jeffords the Republican. Maybe that's hard for people in other areas to understand, but it makes perfect sense to Vermonters.

Pete

www.GatewayToVermont.com

 

[Bird]

Pete, voting for the man instead of the party ain't hard for me to understand. I'm a registered Republican, but I don't always vote a straight party ticket. In fact, I'm not sure what the solution would be, but I don't even like the idea of political parties; I think the person elected should represent the area from which he was elected; not some political party. But in this case, or similar cases, I could never vote for that man again.

Bird

 

[EdDekker]

Farmer Fred (Fred Tuttle, the octogenarian dairy farmer) was either great political theater or the dirtiest of political dirty tricks.


Tuttle had stared in a film by his neighbor, a long time Democrat John O’Brien (son of 1976 candidate for Vermont Governor) in which Tuttle played a candidate for the House of Representatives. O’Brien filed the campaign papers for Tuttle and managed the Tuttle campaign with the encouragement and support of operatives of Senator Leahy. This may have started as a publicity stunt for his film, but was recognized as an unprecedented opportunity (if this was not clear all along).

Since Vermont has an open primary and Senator Leahy had no opposition in the Democrat Primary there was an opportunity: nominate someone in the Republican primary who couldn’t be elected and in fact didn’t even want to be elected. All that was needed was to get a lot of crossover voting in the primary.

Fred Tuttle endorsed Leahy and stated that he would vote for Leahy himself, and repeatedly stated that he hoped he would not win, all before the election. He was never a serious candidate.



Ed

 

[DrDan]

I agree - you should stay what you were elected as. If you want to change it should be done at election time. I have a sneeking suspicion he was paid off. "That's Politics"