The Senate Judiciary Committee last week heard the pros and cons of the most contentious of the nominations for the Bush Cabinet, that of John Ashcroft for attorney general. How should a senator vote, in order to exercise properly his or her constitutional duty to advise and consent?

Enough serious questions have been raised to rule out the rubber-stamp approval often properly accorded a president in his Cabinet selections. This one should be considered on the merits; a senator should not vote “yes” simply because leaders of both parties expect majority approval. Nor is it sufficient for a nominee to assert that he will always enforce the law and will not work to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Such assertions are often truthful, but they must be tested.

Some possible reasons for a “no” vote should also be ruled out. Mr. Ashcroft is not a racist, as some have charged. And his strong, deeply held, conservative views are a matter, not for the Senate, but for President George W. Bush to weigh as he puts together his governing team.

A number of hard questions should bear on a senator’s decision on how to vote. One of these is Mr. Ashcroft’s unexpected one-man maneuver in 1999 that derailed the nomination of Ronnie White, the first black justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, to be a United States district judge. Justice White had been introduced by Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican, who urged confirmation. The Judiciary Committee recommended confirmation, after a hearing in which then-Sen. Ashcroft did not raise the death-penalty issue. But Mr. Ashcroft told his fellow Republicans in their closed caucus that he was going to oppose the nomination. He then led the opposition on the Senate floor, denouncing Justice White as “pro-criminal, with a tremendous bent toward criminal activity” and misrepresenting his views as voting generally against the death penalty. The Senate rejected the nomination on a straight party-line vote.

Mr. Ashcroft then used the death-penalty issue in his campaign for re-election, but he was defeated by Gov. Mel Carnahan, who was killed in a plane crash on the eve of the election but remained on the ballot. It was Mr. Ashcroft’s political behavior, not Justice White’s judicial behavior, that defeated the nomination.

Another hard question involves Mr. Ashcroft’s denial that he had fought President Clinton’s nomination of James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg because Mr. Hormel is gay. Then why did he oppose the nomination? Mr. Ashcroft replied: “Well, frankly, I had known Mr. Hormel for a long time. He had recruited me, when I was a student in college, to go to the University of Chicago Law School… I made a judgment that it would be ill advised to make him ambassador on the totality of the record.” By this vague and suggestive language, Mr. Ashcroft left the impression that he had something on Mr. Hormel but was not willing to state it.

Finally, when Mr. Ashcroft was asked about a St. Louis school-desegregation case, he testified that “both as attorney general and as governor” of Missouri he had followed “all” court orders in the matter. But the fact was that a federal district judge had ruled that the state was “a primary constitutional wrongdoer” in the matter and had threatened to hold Mr. Ashcroft in contempt for his “continual delay and failure to comply” with court orders.

Such evidence should be more than enough to cause any senator to see Mr. Ashcroft as an ideologue, unfit to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, and vote to send the nomination back to President Bush for replacement by a better qualified person.