By Peter Galuszka
It looks like a small group of the Virginia Republicans elite has once again hatched a plot behind closed doors to manipulate elected politics without input from voters.
U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, the victim of a surprising defeat in a June 10 Republican primary, has come up with a self-serving scheme to resign Aug.18 and finagle a special election Nov. 4 to pick his successor. The special election would be held along with a regularly scheduled one.
Normally, opposing candidates Republican David Brat and Democrat Jack Trammel, would routinely face election that day. With Cantor’s proposal, the winner of the special election for the 7th Congressional District seat would be able to take office immediately, instead of having to wait for usual matriculation of the other 434 Congressmen in January.
This is a back-door, move-to-the-head-of-the-class scheme. Presumably, the winner would be Brat who, taking office in November, would be placed ahead of other Congressional newcomers when it comes to coveted committee assignments. Good for the GOP. Bad for Democrats.
For Cantor, of course, it is a Big Win. Since his unexpected and earth-shaking defeat, the 51-year-old has been seen at such posh places as the Hampton is on the tip of Long Island schmoozing with Big Money. Cantor does have an advanced degree from Columbia in real estate finance and his wife was once a New York securities trader. Big Finance, along with Big Pharma and Big Managed Care, has been one of his biggest sources of election funds.
Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia political expert, by turns thought Cantor’s idea “generous” but also noted ”it’s highly probable that he has a deal in the works for his post-Congress life, and he’s eager to get it started,” Sabato was quoted as saying.
As might have been expected, Cantor made his announcement in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, his lapdog newspaper. Editors gushed that his announcement “features an extraordinary column by an extraordinary human being.”
It shows extraordinary cluelessness as well. Cantor, the Main Street Republicans and the TD’s club of Richmond elites don’t seem to understand that it is their very exclusivity that helped do Cantor in and give an upstart like Brat the edge.
Consider a cover story package that I co-wrote in the Chesterfield Monthly, one of the Richmond area’s up-and-coming publications. I found that it wasn’t just that Cantor ignored his district that did him in – it was a putsch by some rather annoyed Libertarians of the traditional ilk and small government moderates plus the Tea Party.
Leaders of the “malcontents” were lawyer Patrick McSweeney and Tea Party leader Jamie Radtke who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2012. In the “Bull Elephant” blog, Radtke compared Cantor and his Confederates as “mobsters” running around and snuffing out dissent among local conservatives.
Brat himself was ultra pissed off a couple of years back when he wanted to get the Henrico County GOP nod to run and replace Bill Janis. But, functioning as the old Soviet Politburo might have, a tiny group of Republican elders decided that the candidate would be Peter Farrell, the young son of utility powerhouse chieftain Tom Farrell of Dominion. In other words, it wasn’t exactly a day for waving the stars and stripes of Democracy. It was pure, Big League, Big Business inside diktat that could have taken place behind the crenelated walls of the Kremlin.
They didn’t give Brat a chance,”analyst Bob Holsworth told me. “That gave Brat the interest in taking on this Don Quixote-type campaign.
Now we get another closed-door deal. Hopefully, voters, conservative and liberal, will fire back.
