Dump Chafee?

National Review says so:

One wonders: Why is Chafee a Republican at all? The senator appears none too sure himself. In 2004, when USA Today asked whether he'd consider switching parties, Chafee replied, "I'm not ruling it out."

The life of a Rhode Island Republican certainly is not an easy one — John Kerry won the state by 21 points. It would be unreasonable to expect Chafee to earn a 100-percent rating from the American Conservative Union. Yet his lifetime score of 41 percent is pathetic. No Republican senator, including Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, ranks lower. In December, the Boston Globe observed that Chafee's "liberal positions would be well-suited for a centrist Democrat." True enough — except that several centrist Democrats actually supported Alito, putting them to the right of Chafee on one of the most important votes they will cast this year.

Lincoln Almond, the former governor who appointed Chafee to the Senate in 1999 — and a Republican who knows how to win elections in Rhode Island — said that he was "disappointed" in the senator's decision to oppose Alito. Indeed, Republicans in the Ocean State ought to be so thoroughly disappointed in Chafee by now that they refuse to vote for him this year.

The argument that conservatives should support Chafee rests entirely on the assumption that he's the only Republican who can win in Rhode Island. This logic may be what has led the National Republican Senatorial Committee to continue throwing resources behind him. The assumption may or may not be true, but, whatever the case, it is far from clear that the GOP — to say nothing of conservatives — gains anything from Chafee's continued presence in the Senate. When votes really matter, he can't be counted on. Positions such as the one he took on Alito allow Democrats and the media to speak of "bipartisan opposition" to the Bush administration. And if the GOP's majority ever depended on Chafee alone, there's every reason to believe he'd bolt the party, just as James Jeffords of Vermont did in 2001.

Chafee's the worst sort of limousine liberal. He lacks even the courage of his daddy's convictions.

Yet someone who votes with you 41 pct of the time is better than someone who never votes with you at all.

Chafee's primary opponent has done a remarkable job as Mayor of Cranston, a formerly corrupt and bleak suburb of Providence. It won't be the people of Cranston voting for him, however, but the people of the entire state. There's no guarantee that he'll win a general election, particularly with every corrupt union hack in the state coming at him.

And as much as I'd love to see Steven Laffey win, I don't think he'll do so, at least not in a midterm election.

Chafee doesn't count for much, but in a midterm, where the very real possibility exists of the GOP losing their narrow Senate majority, he counts for enough. 6 more years of his nonsense is hardly as big a price to pay as 2 years of Democrat control of the chamber.