Eric Cantor Defeated by a Conservative
Who Rips Crony Capitalism, Opposes Immigration Reform
John Nichols on June 11, 2014 - 12:21
AM ET
Tea Party winner focused on opposing immigration reform.
From the start of the campaign, Brat was
aggressive in his opposition to immigration reform—attacking Cantor for making
tepid attempts to move the GOP toward a more moderate position on the issue.
But even Brat’s crude campaigning on immigration came with an anti-corporate twist.
“Eric Cantor doesn’t represent you, he represents large corporations seeking a
never-ending supply of cheap foreign labor,” the challenger argued.
Because Brat highlighted immigration policy as part of the
campaign that upset Cantor, it is likely that Republican leaders will move toward
an even sharper stance in opposition to meaningful reform. That likelihood led
Dream Act Coalition co-director Cesar Vargas to say that with Cantor’s
defeat—after being attacked as “too soft on immigration”—“there is no chance of
getting anything done legislatively on the subject through the summer, after
which it would be difficult to get anything done with presidential speculation beginning.”
Vargas argues that instead of offering House Republicans
more time to act on immigration reform, the president “should offer deportation
relief, and other forms of administrative relief, now.”
That’s an insightful response to the
Cantor defeat. Americans are
ready for immigration reform—polls
suggest that more than two-thirds
of Americans support a pathway to
citizenship and reject mass
deportation. A new Public Policy
Polling survey, conducted Tuesday
night in Cantor’s district, concludes
that “72 percent of voters in
Cantor’s district support the
bipartisan immigration reform
legislation on the table in Washington
right now to only 23 percent
who are opposed.”
The DC-insider storyline about this
being a great year for the
Republican establishment is undergoing
a rapid rewrite. For the first
time since the post was formally
established in 1899, a House majority
leader has been defeated in a bid for
renomination.
And as political
prognosticators, Republican stalwarts
and savvy Democrats search for
explanations, they are being forced to
consider complexities they had
not previously entertained—including
the prospect of conservatives who
are ready and willing to criticize big
business.
Eric Cantor, the face of the GOP
establishment, one of the party’s
most prodigious fundraisers and the
odds-on favorite to become the
next speaker of the House, lost his
Virginia Republican primary
Tuesday to a challenger who promised,
“I will fight to end crony
capitalist programs that benefit the
rich and powerful.”
The result shocked the not just the
Republican establishment but the
DC establishment. The shockwaves
continued Wednesday, as Republican
aides said Cantor would step down July
31from his position as the
second most powerful figure in the
House—ending the congressman’s run
as a Washington power player who
championed the interests of Wall
Street and corporate America.
That Wall Street connection was a
central theme of the challenge that
displaced Cantor.
Dave Brat, who defeated the number-two
Republican in the House by a
56-44 margin, tore into big business
almost as frequently as he did
the incumbent. “I am running against
Cantor because he does not
represent the citizens of the 7th
District, but rather large
corporations seeking insider deals,
crony bailouts and a constant
supply of low-wage workers,” declared
the challenger.
Cantor dismissed Brat as a “liberal
college professor.”
That was false—at least the liberal
part.
Though Brat is a professor who teaches
economics at Randolph-Macon
College in Ashland, Virginia, he is
definitely not a liberal. He ran
to the right of Cantor on the issues;
he outlined the premises of his
campaign in an extended interview with
the conservative National
Review; and he announced on his
Facebook page, “It’s time we elect a
conservative, not just a Republican, to
represent us.”
But Brat’s low-budget campaign came
with a twist. He ran as something
rare in American politics—so rare that
many political commentators
have a hard time comprehending the
calculus. On a number of issues,
the challenger positioned himself as an
anti-corporate conservative.
Indeed, as Politico noted during the
course of the campaign, “The
central theme of Brat’s campaign is
that Cantor is beholden to
business—specifically the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce and the Business
Roundtable.”
That does not make Brat any sort of
progressive, or even a populist by
most contemporary measures; nor does it
make his harsh right-wing
positions on a number of issues any
more noble than those same
positions when they are taken by
Republicans who regularly pocket
checks from Wall Street interests. Brat
has some ties to wealthy
libertarians, and he’s written about
“the moral foundations in Ayn
Rand”—even if he “says…he isn’t a
Randian.”
Yet Brat’s anti-corporate rhetoric
distinguished him from Cantor, and
from most prominent Republicans—whether
they identify with the
Republican “establishment” or the Tea
Party wing of a party that in
recent years has been defined by its
subservience to corporate
interests.
From the start of the campaign, Brat
was aggressive in his opposition
to immigration reform—attacking Cantor
for making tepid attempts to
move the GOP toward a more moderate
position on the issue. But even
Brat’s crude campaigning on immigration
came with an anti-corporate
twist. “Eric Cantor doesn’t represent
you, he represents large
corporations seeking a never-ending
supply of cheap foreign labor,”
the challenger argued.
Because Brat highlighted immigration
policy as part of the campaign
that upset Cantor, it is likely that
Republican leaders will move
toward an even sharper stance in
opposition to meaningful reform. That
likelihood led Dream Act Coalition
co-director Cesar Vargas to say
that with Cantor’s defeat—after being
attacked as “too soft on
immigration”—“there is no chance of
getting anything done
legislatively on the subject through
the summer, after which it would
be difficult to get anything done with
presidential speculation
beginning.”
Vargas argues that instead of offering
House Republicans more time to
act on immigration reform, the
president “should offer deportation
relief, and other forms of
administrative relief, now.”
That’s an insightful response to the
Cantor defeat. Americans are
ready for immigration reform—polls suggest
that more than two-thirds
of Americans support a pathway to
citizenship and reject mass
deportation. A new Public Policy
Polling survey, conducted Tuesday
night in Cantor’s district, concludes
that “72 percent of voters in
Cantor’s district support the
bipartisan immigration reform
legislation on the table in Washington
right now to only 23 percent
who are opposed.”
It may be that hard-core Republican
primary voters, particularly in
Southern states where primary turnout
is usually very low, will
continue to threaten GOP members of the
House and Senate who display
even the slightest moderation on the
issue. But the PPP data suggests
that wasn’t the only factor in Cantor’s
defeat. Indeed, recent polling
by PPP and other firms suggests that
the Obama White House and
congressional Democrats would be unwise
to imagine that a Virginia
Republican primary result argues for an
abandonment of immigration
reform.
Are there other insights to be taken
from Brat’s defeat of Cantor?
Perhaps. And they could have
implications for the broader politics of
2014 and 2016.
Brat, whose campaign raised and spent
roughly $200,000 versus Cantor’s
$5 million campaign, attracted
grassroots Tea Party support. But the
professor actually missed meetings with
top national conservatives
that had been organized in Washington
for mid-May—with the campaign
explaining that Brat had to focus on
preparations for final exams.
His distance from the national
conservative establishment, much of
which aligns with the same business
interests as the Republican
establishment, was evident in Brat’s
harshest criticism of Cantor.
“In my view, the greatest moral
failure—which disqualifies Cantor for
high public office—was his abuse of the
public trust concerning the
STOCK Act, a bipartisan bill that was
going through after the
financial crisis,” the professor wrote
in a pre-election article for
the opinion pages of theRichmond
Times-Dispatch, the dominant
newspaper in the region. “The Stock
Act,” noted Brat, “was intended to
ban insider trading on congressional
knowledge for congressmen and
their families. CNN discovered that
Cantor altered the language of the
House version in order to allow family
members and spouses to continue
insider trading on congressional
knowledge. In my view, this action
was beneath the dignity of the office.
Virginians deserve better and I
pledge to treat everyone equally under
the law.”
Brat is so little known at this point
that it is hard to say where he
will end up politically. He’ll face a
solid Democrat in
November—fellow Randolph-Macon College
professor Jack Trammell—but his
chances of winning the November
election in an overwhelmingly
Republican district are good.
If Brat does go to Congress as a conservative
critic of big business,
and of the GOP’s alliance with
corporate interests, he could open up a
lot of new debates within the party,
and beyond its boundaries. On
election night, he was telling Fox
News, “The issue is the Republican
Party has been paying way too much
attention to Wall Street and not
enough to Main Street.” He spoke of “a
fissure between Main Street and
Wall Street,” arguing that Republican
leaders had forgotten that,
“Dollars dont vote, people do.”
That language suggests Brat could align
with others, such as North
Carolina CongressmanWalter Jones Jr.,
an old-right conservative, and
Michigan’s Justin Amash, a younger
libertarian-leaning member, who
have run afoul of Republican
leaders—including Cantor.
Both Jones and Amash have reached
across party lines and worked with
progressive Democrats on a host of
issues, including efforts to
restrict NSA surveillance, to block
free-trade deals and even (in
Jones’s case) to amend the US
Constitution to get corporate cash out
of politics.
After his victory, Brat told
interviews, “Our founding was built by
people who were political philosophers,
and we need to get back to
that, away from this kind of cheap
political rhetoric of right and
left.”
On at least one issue, privacy rights,
Brat seems to be very much in
agreement with Amash and Jones—and
progressives such as Congressman
John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who
has worked with Amash to
address NSA abuses. The Virginian’s
issue primer declares, “Dave
believes that the Constitution does not
need to be compromised for
matters of national security. He
supports the end of bulk phone and
email data collection by the NSA, IRS,
or any other branch of
government.”
In his new book, Unstoppable: The
Emerging Left-Right Alliance to
Dismantle the Corporate State (Nation
Books), Ralph Nader argues that
there are many issues on which an
anti-corporate left and an
anti-corporate right could achieve
“convergence” in opposition to
policies advanced by “corporate
conservatives and corporate liberals.”
Nader’s point is not to suggest that
the left and the right will be in
specific agreement on issues ranging
from fair trade to restricting
domestic surveillance to whittling down
the military-industrial
complex. He suggeststhat “they [can]
come at it for different reasons,
but they [can] have the same
conclusion.”
That’s an intriguing notion, especially
after one of the most powerful
corporate Republicans in Washington
just lost to a guy who decries
“large corporations seeking insider
deals” and “crony bailouts.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/180189/eric-cantor-defeated-conservative-who-rips-crony-capitalism#
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