Human Events is speculating that Hagel and Warner might hang it up next year and retire from the U.S. Senate. It’s a reasonable conclusion. Hagel has ruined himself in Nebraska. He already has a strong primary challenger in Nebraska who is beating him in the polls and John Warner hasn’t bothered to start fund raising for next year. I say good riddance to both of them. They haven’t been reliable to the party on many issues and we can do better, especially in Nebraska, being such a conservative state.

On Hagel:

State Attorney General Jon Bruning has already signaled he is running for the Republican nomination regardless of what Hagel does. A day after my lunch, the July 4 Pancake Breakfast for Nebraska Republicans was held for the 29th year in a row in Omaha. An attendee at the breakfast told me that “the Bruning people were out in force. They must have had 25 people in T-shirts for Bruning and numerous others handing out stickers. And Bruning came and walked the parades. Hagel was there as well, but with no support except for his chief of staff, Lou Ann Linehan.”

On Warner:

After thirty years in the Senate — exceeding the tenures of past Old Dominion Sens. A. Willis Robertson, Carter Glass, and Harry Byrd, Sr. and Jr. — John Warner really has no reason to stay on. With odds favoring a Democratic majority next year, the chances of the 80-year-old senator regaining a key committee chairmanship are slim.

The worst-kept secret in the state is that Rep. Tom Davis of Northern Virginia will run if Warner calls it quits. The two are close (longtime Davis political operative John Hishta ran Warner’s re-election bid in ’96, the last time he was seriously challenged for renomination and in the general election) and sources close to both men expect Warner will give Davis a heads-up on his retirement announcement.

What Warner cannot do for Davis, however, is what he did for himself in 1996: determine the venue for the Republican nomination. Under very unique party rules, an incumbent GOP office-holder can call for a primary or convention as the means of nomination but, if there is no incumbent, it is up to the state committee of the party to say what the procedure is. When Warner ran eleven years ago, he called for a primary as a means of settling his challenge from former Reagan budget chief Jim Miller; with no party registration in Virginia, voters who consider themselves independents and Democrats could come out to support Warner, who had irked conservatives on numerous occasions. He won renomination by a margin of 2-to-1.

Should Warner step down next year, it is almost a foregone conclusion that the state committee, top-heavy with conservatives, will opt for the convention system. This does not bode well for Davis (lifetime American Conservative Union rating: 70%), whose positions on abortion and the issues of federal employees have irked Republicans on the right.