01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Sen. Lincoln Chafee's stances in the Samuel Alito controversy seem more likely to hurt the senator than to help him politically.

By voting against (after weeks of nationally publicized indecision) a highly qualified, albeit controversial, jurist nominated for the Supreme Court, but opposing a Democratic filibuster against the nomination, Mr. Chafee raised complaints that he was trying to have it both ways. He voted against a man whom many Rhode Islanders don't like, mostly because of fears that Justice Alito will vote to strike down Roe v. Wade (and thus return the abortion-rights issue entirely to the jurisdiction of the states), while trying to retain some link to the Republican Party, which controls the Senate, by voting against the filibuster.

Of course, Mr. Chafee also cited other concerns about Mr. Alito, such as the New Jersey jurist's feared skepticism about some environmental regulation. "Environmentalism," however vague and plastic its application can be in reality, is very important to Mr. Chafee, and his generally upscale and well-educated followers.

The senator also made much of the controversy around President Bush's use of extraordinary powers in wiretapping, e-mail viewing, and other strenuous surveillance stemming from the open-ended "war on terror." But Justice Alito's mind on this matter is far from clear to most people, and Senator Chafee's concerns seem a bit of a stretch. We tend to agree with Mark Moller, of the Cato Institute (a Libertarian think tank whose members have generally opposed the Bush administration's expansion of surveillance powers, and challenged their legality), that "[w]hen it comes to divining Alito's views on executive power, there are not many tea leaves to read, and those we have here don't tell us much."

Still, we suspect that Mr. Chafee's vote mostly came down to Roe v. Wade, which trumps almost everything else for a certain segment of the population, whether pro (as is The Journal) or con. Indeed, it was difficult all along to see how the senator could vote to confirm a jurist who didn't clearly support that 1973 ruling, which federalized abortion rights; for too many, Roe v. Wade is the only issue.

The politics around a GOP senator who is more liberal than most Democrats are murky, if often entertaining. But we'd guess that Senator Chafee's apparent long indecision and then final contortions in the Alito controversy have reduced his influence.

Indeed, the vote could lose him the primary-election campaign against the more conservative Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey. And even if Mr. Chafee wins that contest, his vote in the Alito flap probably won't help him much in the general election. After all, no matter how liberal Mr. Chafee presents himself as, most liberals will vote for the Democrat -- while saying, de rigueur, how much they admire the plucky and independent Senator Chafee and the whole Chafee family. And if there's a growing sense that the Democrats, pouncing on the Abramoff scandal, might somehow retake the Senate in November, Mr. Chafee's Democratic foe will clearly argue the great usefulness of sending someone to Washington who's in the party controlling that august chamber. More pork for Rhode Island.

At this juncture, Lincoln Chafee remains a very interesting politician, but an increasingly marginalized one. Yet he's full of surprises, and, as British Prime Minister Harold Wilson used to say, "A week is an eternity in politics."