I may have seen this suggested here before, but for the life of me I can’t find it.  So if you front-pagers read this, please know I’m not plagarizing intentionally…

We need a plan in place for when we take back Congress.  It’s not enough just to elect conservatives like Marco Rubio, Bob McDonnell, and Jim DeMint.  To take back Congress, we are also going to have to put up with the occasional Mark Kirk and Mike Castle — it’s not as if we can keep them from running, can we?  And they have their place as well – just make sure they get in the right place, that’s the trick.

Here’s what I mean.  If you’re like me, you want Roe v. Wade overturned.  If you’re like me, you want to go a step further, and start chipping away at the foundation for Roe, a decision called Griswold v. Connecticut. The penumbra argument started there, and real progress can only be made in this arena if we start attacking the cornerstones of statism.  So how do we do that sort of thing?

Make sure the Kirks and Castles of the world stay off the Senate Judiciary committee.  Stack Judiciary with DeMints, and we start getting some Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases again.

You might ask, “but where do we put Kirk and Castle?”

If they’re looking for powerful committees, I suggest the Appropriations committee — especially for Kirk.  Castle I expect to be a six-year seatwarmer for Beau Biden (Castle’s kind of old), so give him something he can help on, but won’t be expected to rise to a chairmanship — maybe Budget, Finance, or Foreign Relations.  That way, his influence on social conservatism is limited, but he is still an important member of the Senate team.

Useful idiots (or RINOs) can be just that: Useful.  That doesn’t mean we should support them whenever they run (a la Crist), but whenever they’re the last resort, put them where they can be useful to conservatism.  Kirk can be useful to conservatism — just keep him away from the Energy and Judiciary committees.

That’s the part of the plan we have been missing.  For too long, we have blindly voted for Republicans, trusting them to do the correct thing for conservatism.  But that’s clearly not enough.  We have to set the committee assignments, too.

Think of the Senate in the same way Ronald Reagan thought of the Soviet Union:

Trust, but verify.