House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s loss in a primary last night tells us a lot of about the state of the GOP.
The big political news this week probably has to be House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s loss to a Tea Party challenger on Tuesday night. This may sound obscure, but it really isn’t. Eric Cantor’s job made him the number two guy in the House of Representative’s Republican leadership and he was long consider a possible replacement, or rival, for current House Speaker John Boehner. In fact this sort of upset is pretty rare, the last time this happened was in 1899.
This is going to have an impact in two major ways. The first being pretty obvious: since any member of the House Leadership is very influential, especially on what get votes on, any change in that makeup can have big effects. But secondly it will have a major impact just because politicians tend to be overly frightened about losing elections in general. So this upset will be interpreted by lots of Republicans that being squishy when it comes to hard line Republican issues is a recipe for doom, and Republicans will take an even harder line with it comes to compromise and other issues.
Cantor was challenged by an obscure conservative professor of economics named David Brat who focused heavily Cantor’s votes to raise the debt ceiling, end the shutdown, and accused Cantor of being soft on immigration reform. This has led a lot of journalists and pundits to laud this result as proof of an ongoing “civil war” inside the Republican Party between and mainstream “establishment” and a Tea Party insurgency. But here’s the thing, Cantor isn’t really some squishy moderate at all. He’s a conservative Republican whose long been seen as someone pushing the GOP to adopt a harder line in negotiations with President Obama, and a part of the future of the party as a Republican “young gun” hero. In fact Cantor was instrumental in torpedoing John Boehner’s so called “Grand Bargain” with President Obama just three years ago.
Which all goes to show you how phony the whole GOP “civil war” really is. I mean it would be one thing if Cantor really did disagree with the Republican Caucus on major issues, but he never really has, which is the main reason he was promoted to the number two spot in the first place. Instead of major inter-party battle going on over contentious issues like what happened inside the Democratic Party over Jim Crow in 40’s and 50’s we are witnessing issue free fights with the action all being about who gets accused of being a RINO traitor this week.
The sad part is the jokes on us the American public. Cantor will have no problem picking a lucrative gig in the private sector, all sorts of special interests pay good money for access to former political bigwigs like him. Meanwhile the Republican Party will get even more extreme and more afraid of basic compromise across the board. Which in turn will lead to an even more dysfunctional Washington.
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Photo by Susan Walsh/AP