Say this for Judd Gregg: He's not following the polls. Or last fall's election results. (He wasn't on the ballot, after all.) His president's been rebuked, his party's in the minority and his constituents have made clear they don't support the war in Iraq. It'll take more than that, though, for New Hampshire's senior U.S. senator to change his spots.

Last month, the Senate debated lobbying reform. The measure passed 96-2, Gregg in the majority. But the game was closer than the final score suggests. One day earlier Gregg had sponsored an amendment that sought to let the president challenge earmarks inserted into huge spending bills. When Senate Democrats blocked the amendment from being debated, Gregg and the Republicans blocked the progress of the lobbying bill.

For one night and morning, Washington was abuzz at the prospect that lobbying reform might be derailed and that Judd Gregg was gumming up the works.

Speaking on the Senate floor the next week, Gregg assured his colleagues he had not had mischief in mind. "I regret that last week it got caught up and was represented by some as being an attempt to poison the lobbying bill," he said in a speech the Monitor excerpted on the Jan. 24 Forum page ("A 'second look' at budget discipline"). "That was never my intention at all."

Was the lobbying bill actually imperiled? It doesn't look that way in retrospect. The Senate leaders quickly agreed to vote on Gregg's amendment during the subsequent debate on a minimum wage bill. That cleared the way for the lobbying measure, and it passed overwhelmingly.

This week Gregg is again at the center of a Senate impasse, this time over Iraq.

Democrats had been hoping to vote on a nonbinding resolution disapproving of President Bush's announced troop surge. Republicans, above all else, wanted to avoid such a vote because it would highlight the split in the president's party over his war policy. So far the Republicans are winning, and Gregg gets some of the credit.

He proposed his own resolution. It didn't endorse apple pie but did oppose "endanger(ing) United States military forces in the field." Had it come to a vote, in other words, it was a cinch to pass. So once again the Democrats blocked a vote on a Gregg amendment, and Republicans blocked a vote on the anti-surge resolution.

Is this what New Hampshire residents want? Do Gregg's constituents fancy him in the role Majority Leader Harry Reid dubbed the Republicans' "see-if-we-can-mess-up-the-legislation guy?"

Reid was speaking "with a smile on my face," he made explicit on the Senate floor, adding that his fondness for Gregg made it especially hard to oppose him. Nonetheless, on "every piece of legislation we have brought up, the senator from New Hampshire has tried to throw a monkey wrench into it. It happened on ethics, it happened on the minimum wage, and now on this Iraq issue."

Democrats who can't believe any New Hampshire politician would continue to support the president can commiserate today when a new MoveOn.org commercial will call on Gregg to change course. They should not, however, hold their breath.

On Iraq, on No Child Left Behind and a host of other issues, Judd Gregg has been as loyal an ally as President Bush has had. True, Gregg used to pretend he was Al Gore or John Kerry so that Bush could prepare for presidential debates. But that's as close as Gregg is likely to come to turning on the current White House.

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Monitor editorial