House Minority Whip Eric Cantor easily won relection and with Republicans now in charge of the House, he’ll likely be House Majority Leader, giving the Old Dominion GOP new luster in Washington.
The convention wisdom is that popular frustration with the lack of job growth, President Barack Obama’s health care law, growing federal debt and deficits and the expansion of federal government power, either real or imagined, fueled the drubbing.
But if one starts to dissect the voting, the exercise becomes a bit more confusing. Periello
lost because he backed Obama on many issues, including health care. Nye lost because, for one reason, he broke with Obama on health care. Boucher, a veteran, 14-term congressman from the state’s coal country lost because he backed cap and trade legislation to control global warming. Perhaps, but real cap and trade is quite a ways into the future and the boom, if any, in the state’s coal industry is from exporting metallurgical coal to Chinese steel mills which would not be affected by any U.S. cap and trade law at all.
If you read columnists at The Wall Street Journal, Cantor is responsible for the Republican victories because he helped conceive and lead a come-back strategy for his party. The “Young Gun” admitted his party srayed during the years of George W. Bush, although Cantor forgets he voted lockstep with Bush on just about everything.
So, what’s next? If Cantor prevails, we are certain to have a federal legislature that won’t do anything at all. Cantor and his confederates will raise “the Party of No” to a new level, but it will still be “No.” They will spend the next two years trying to repeal Obamacare, which is still a long-shot because the Republicans did not take the Senate and Obama still has veto power. As for creating new jobs, there hasn’t been much in the way of ideas on the Cantor front.
Another curiousity is how Cantor will get along with U.S. Rep. John Boehner, who will likely replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. But don’t expect a new GOP lovefest. There appears to be tension between Boehner and Cantor, who somehow left Boehner out of his “Young Guns” book.
As for the Tea Party movement, they got on the roadmap by fanning their frustrations with Washington, but they didn’t have a complete sweep. Delaware’s Chrstine O’Donnell, for instance, was easily defeated despite her support from Sarah Palin.
True, Tuesday was a GOP victory. But it was a limited one and did not give the GOP both houses of Congress as their 1994 rout against Bill Clinton did. Virginia’s new congressmen and Cantor’s ascension do not spell progress, but two more years of stalemate.
