erewith the editorialist's dilemma: We found it unseemly of Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire to rush back into the fold of the Republican Party after the death of his colleague John Chafee when he sensed that Chafee's committee chairmanship was in the offing. It would have been satisfying to call on the Senate's Republican leadership to deny Smith the chairmanship and drop him to the bottom of the seniority ladder for bolting the GOP to flirt with various third parties. After all, just weeks before, Smith had called the Republican Party ''bloated'' and ''a fraud'' that had betrayed its conservative principles.
But consider the alternative. If Smith hadn't gotten the chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee that had been Chafee's, it would have gone to James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a senator with an even dimmer environmental record than Smith's. The League of Conservation Voters, which ranks members of Congress based on a variety of votes, gives Smith a lifetime score of 36 percent while Inhofe gets just 7 percent.
Smith has not been shy about saying he wants to make the committee more friendly to business. When he finally did receive the chairmanship last Tuesday, he said: ''The federal government should step in when there is an emergency and not be the prime force if states and local communities can do it better.'' This laissez-faire attitude is in contrast to Chafee's affirmative role in crafting environmental laws.
Inhofe is a direct antagonist to environmental causes. He has opposed reauthorizing the Clean Air Act, and he has said the theory of global warming is based on ''alarmist rhetoric.''
More to the point, New Hampshire is not Oklahoma, a state heavily dependent on oil exploration and production. New Hampshire's economy depends at least in part on environmental tourism. Indeed, Smith supports full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses oil royalties to preserve natural areas from development.
So we are pleased to see Smith in the chairman's seat, all things considered, and hope he will come to know, as Chafee did, what ''conservation'' and ''conservative'' have in common: a belief in conserving things of value against heedless exploitation and waste.
