Will Anybody Really Miss Eric Cantor?
His stunning loss was built on a terrible record of big-government conservatism at its worst.
This article originally appeared at The Daily Beast on June 11, 2014.
Will anybody really miss Eric Cantor? Probably not. Despite (or maybe because of) his position in the House Republican leadership and the historic nature of his primary loss, there was virtually nothing remarkable about him as a politician or a policymaker. The Republicans have dozens or hundreds or thousands more just like him. He's like a Dorito corn chip in those old Jay Leno ads: They'll make more.
Cantor exemplifies what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) just denounced as a "Chamber of Commerce"-style GOP legislator, "the same-old, same-old," standard-issue Republican who has brought the party to a historically low level of self-identification among voters.
Cantor was what passes for a small-government conservative. Which is to say that Cantor was in favor of shrinking the size and scope of government…except for the endless list of exceptions that allowed him to help grow federal spending by more than 50 percent in real terms, and regulatory spending by even more, during the Bush years.
You know the drill: As a "conservative," Cantor wanted the government out of people's lives because FREEDOM-FOUNDING FATHERS-CONSTITUTION. Yet Cantor was anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion (he even wanted to prohibit adults from transporting minors across state lines if they were getting abortions). Because the federal government really should dictate all that, right? He endorsed a constitutional amendment against flag burning because free expression doesn't mean you can actually express what you mean. He was pro-gun or, more specifically, pro-National Rifle Association. He was pro-drug war. Nothing unique or interesting there.
He wavered ever-so-slightly on immigration reform, meaning that he believed some children of immigrants shouldn't be punished for their parents' transgressions (big of him, really, at least in a GOP context). But he voted to build a militarized fence along our border with Mexico, pulled a 100 percent rating from the xenophobes at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and he wanted English to be the official language of America (what's Mexican for WTF?). He loved the national security state (including virtually unchecked surveillance of Americans as well as foreigners), defense spending, and wars (especially when a Republican was in the White House). He voted for No Child Left Behind, the single-biggest increase in federal control over education because education is an issue best dealt with at the local level, unless conservative Republicans run the country.
On spending and economic issues, he was atrocious and hypocritical in all the ways that a Republican can be. Of course he voted for the 2003 expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs, even as he voted against allowing Medicare to negotiate cheaper prices for that unwarranted giveaway to the nation's seniors. He signed off on the Bush budgets and he championed the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the illegal auto bailouts (at least as long as a Republican was president).
Like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cantor was a spirited defender of the Export-Import Bank, an FDR-created boondoggle that guarantees loans to foreign businesses who buy American products. As the Mercatus Center's Veronique de Rugy has shown, the Ex-Im Bank is among the purest excrescences of crony capitalism, with favored U.S. companies such as Boeing getting massive subsidies via the program. Cantor was the leader in the effort to reauthorize it two years ago and was the point man on this year's reauthorization too. He loved the House Republican budget resolution, the so-called Path to Prosperity, which is full of accounting tricks (such as zeroing out spending on Obamacare while keeping all the program's revenues) and would increase annual federal spending from $3.7 trillion in 2015 to $5 trillion in 2024.
If Cantor does indeed exemplify the Chamber of Commerce-style Republican that enflames the Tea Party even more than it does liberal and progressive Democrats, does the majority leader's defeat spell doom for the GOP establishment?
I hope so, but it's far from clear. Cantor's district had been redrawn, and while it remained solidly red, he was unfamiliar in much of it. His internal polling was way off, so he didn't start a counter-campaign until it was too late. For reasons that aren't clear, he pulled 8,500 fewer total votes in this primary than he did in 2012, a drop The Washington Post notes is wider than his opponent's 7,200-vote margin of victory.
Primary voters tend to be much more ideological and extreme than general-election voters, so they aren't representative of larger party dynamics. Economics professor David Brat vanquished Cantor in part by touting a tough line on immigration, but it's not clear that rank-and-file Republicans are anti-immigrant or even care much about the topic. A recent Politico poll, for instance, finds 64 percent of Republican voters in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, and the topic is way down on lists of voter concerns.
For all those reasons, I think it's folly to talk about Cantor's loss as meaning more than the obvious: He perfectly represented the modal Republican in that he talked about limiting government while actively growing its reach in virtually every way. That is a supremely unattractive character to be in contemporary American politics, and it helps explain why Gallup finds just 25 percent of Americans identify as Republicans (the news isn't rosy for Democrats, either, according to Gallup: Just 31 percent of Americans identify with that centuries-old brand). Last Saturday, Rand Paul told the Texas Republican Liberty Caucus that people everywhere "say it's time…for this libertarian moment, this liberty moment. It's no longer something that scares people, it's what [makes] people say, we can't run the same-old, same-old, we're not going to win with the same-old, same-old." Eric Cantor was definitely the same-old, same-old. The GOP is choking on guys (yes, guys) just like him who talk about limited government and then legislate in a totally different way.
I hope that Paul is right and folks want to embrace a vision of limited government that extends to social issues and spending issues. I don't think the rejection of Cantor by primary voters tells us much about that. But it does signal that the status quo is up for grabs and that undistinguished pols like Cantor should be shaking in their boots.
This article originally appeared at The Daily Beast on June 11, 2014.