It was July 12, in the midst of chaos over the campaign finance reform bill offered by Shays and Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass. Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, took to the floor to denounce the Shays-Meehan team for complaining about parliamentary hurdles the Republican leadership had set up for their bill.

"This is unreasonable," Armey said on the House floor. "It's naive. It's uninformed. It's arrogant."

This was the nice version. In a closed-door meeting with the House Republicans, tempers flared ferociously. "It was very nasty," says Rep. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Shays-Meehan crew. "The tone of the caucus was out of bounds."

Republicans were angry at Shays and the other reformers, and furious with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was working with the House GOP moderates and Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., to get the controversial bill passed. Bellicose adjectives and venomous invective filled the room. That's when Shays got teary. When it was time for him to speak, his voice cracked, and he had to take a moment to collect himself.

"The toughest thing was recognizing that diplomacy had failed and it really was going to be more guerrilla warfare," Shays says now. "I was kind of depressed about the implications of what was happening. So I had to fight back the tears."

According to Shays-Meehan advocate Scott Harshbarger, the president of Common Cause, there's no reason to doubt Shays' mettle. "He's a tough guy, he just expresses it in a much different way."

But in a House with a mere six-seat Republican majority, it doesn't take more than a few errant Republican congressmen, however pacifist they seem -- and Shays was a Peace Corps volunteer -- to gum up the works. For President Bush, with the Senate now in Democratic hands, it's incumbent upon the House GOP leadership to serve as an unwaveringly loyal kid brother, rubber-stamping Bush's initiatives and shielding him from having to veto legislation he doesn't even want to touch.

But Shays and his fellow moderates have become something of a problem in this regard. Last Friday, 19 of them joined with 198 House Democrats to oppose Bush's rollback of the tougher standards for arsenic in drinking water that President Clinton had signed into law in the waning days of his presidency. Weeks before that, a similar group (including Shays) joined with Democrats to sandbag some offshore-drilling measures favored by both Bush and Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. Two weeks ago, questions from an amorphous group of GOP moderates (including Shays) held up a vote on Bush's faith-based initiative for a day.

The GOP moderates, who generally seem more distressed than empowered by their newfound power, make up a free-floating group that includes at its core, along with Shays, Reps. Sherwood Boehlert and Amo Houghton of New York, Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania, Mike Castle of Delaware, Marge Roukema of New Jersey and Mark Foley of Florida. Unlike conservative Democrats such as Rep. Charlie Stenholm of Texas and Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, these defiant ones express adoration for their leadership and their party. They don't flirt with the idea of a Jim Jeffords-esque party hop. They don't even seem to enjoy bucking their leadership, however often they do it.

"I don't like fights," Shays says in his mild-mannered, NPR voice, summing up the ethos of the House GOP moderates. "But I get in them a lot. I don't like it." House GOP moderates tend to come from suburban districts in Yankee states and are socially more liberal, but as a group, they're amorphous. "It's an ever-changing cast," says a House GOP leadership source. "It depends on the issue of the day." Unlike, say, the 33-member conservative Blue Dog Democrats, there is no official, organized clump of GOP moderates. There's an informal Tuesday lunch group and a GOP "Main Street" coalition, but Shays and the moderates have yet to exploit their positions to become a power bloc. At least, not yet.

It hasn't helped that the White House is hardly reaching out to the sudden power brokers. Though his support for Bush has been unequivocal -- he even went down to Palm Beach County during the Florida presidential election recount to serve as a Republican observer, and he supported the president's tax cut enthusiastically -- Shays has been invited to the White House only once.

Salon News A Salon-eye view of the day's news, with investigative reports, analysis and interviews with newsmakers.