After All is Said and Done, We've Got 41 Senators

Mark Noonan

As the earmark vote shows – with 6 Republicans who will be there in 2011 voting against it:

…Sens. Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), James Inhofe (Okla.), Dick Lugar (Ind.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Richard Shelby (Ala.) voted against an amendment to food-safety legislation that would have enacted a two-year ban on the spending items. Retiring Sen. George Voinovich (Ohio) and defeated Sen. Bob Bennett (Utah) also voted against it…

I’ve already said we should boot Murkowski out of the GOP caucus for her behavior after the Alaska primary. Susan Collins and Dick Lugar are “Specter-lite” Republicans…and we should seek a primary challenger to Lugar in 2012, if he decides to seek re-election (the way Indiana went GOP in 2010 shows that we’d have an outside shot at unseating him in 2012). The really dismaying vote is from Inhofe – he knows better and his weak, “then Obama will get to spend the money” defense of his vote reeks of insiderism.

We have to accept that, right now, the Senate GOP caucus is still our weak link. But this vote shows that we can probably rely upon 41 GOP Senators to stick with us in 2011 – enough to sustain a filibuster. Matched with our increasingly conservative House GOP, that should be enough to stop Obama’s liberalism in its tracks.

As for the future – our job, now, is to swamp the RINOs. Elect so many conservatives in 2012 that they won’t matter so much. All such Republicans eagerly look for the chance to cut conservatism off at the knees…and they love it when they can be the 51st vote in favor of liberalism, or the 60th vote to close of debate and allow a liberal measure to go for a vote. They like doing it because they love the applause it gets them from the MSM and their friends in the Democrat ranks…and, of course, doing so ensures they’ll be invited to the elite social events. But, if we can move our conservative GOP caucus from 41 to 51 Senators, they’ll be stymied in their ability to betray us, and thus we can start to use them to work for our side.

This is why, by the way, I was ok with losing with O’Donnell rather than winning with Castle. True, if Castle had been the nominee there was that chance (wrong though it proved) that we could have won the Senate. But with Castle added to the Senate, we’d just have 7 Senators in 2011 we can’t rely upon. A smaller number of GOPers who will actually fight for the people is superior to a larger number who will betray them.

Additionally, the results of 2010 show that conservatism (or, at least, a libertarian version of it) can run well all over the country. We can, if we fight for it, eventually get a reform Congress which will do what needs to be done to control government and restore American manufacturing, farming and mining to pre-eminence. This won’t be easy – and we might not get it before the 2014 elections (we have large opportunities for Senate pick ups in both 2012 and 2014). But we won’t get it, at all, unless we nominate and elect more people like DeMint over people like Lugar.

And now, to work.