WASHINGTON – Eric Cantor hasn’t always been a Tea Party darling.
But in the midst of tense debt ceiling negotiations between congressional leaders and the White House, the House of Representatives’ majority leader has become a heroic figure to Tea Party activists and other anti-spending conservatives.
Cantor has taken a tough stance against raising taxes, saying they are absolutely not on the table from a Republican perspective as the talks focus on how to reduce the country’s staggering $14.3 trillion national debt.
“We are not going to raise taxes. The votes aren’t in the House to raise taxes,” the congressman from Virginia said earlier this week.
“If they want to vote on the debt ceiling, they are going to have to come meet us and we are going to have a package that does not have any net new revenues.”
Just four months ago, Cantor was in trouble with Tea Party activists in his own state for opposing a congressional amendment that would have made even deeper cuts to the federal budget than the US$61 billion that the House had just passed.
“We are extremely disappointed in Eric Cantor, but not surprised,” Mark Lloyd, chairman of the Virginia Federation of Tea Party Patriots, said at the time.
“The will of the American people was pretty clear in November – cut, cut, cut spending. Apparently, Eric Cantor’s ‘conversion’ to fiscal restraint was only temporary.”
What a difference a few months makes. Cantor’s earning high marks from Tea Party activists in the state, although those kudos come with a warning.
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“We want to hold his feet to the fire, so that means no raising the debt limit and no new taxes. If he holds to that, then he’ll pick up some more brownie points with us, if you will,” Erik Kritter, an activist with the Bedford Franklin Tea Party in southern Virginia, said in an interview Wednesday.
“If he caves, people are going to be really, really mad at him, worse than they were a few months ago. The president is ratcheting up the pressure to raise the debt ceiling and taxes … come election time next year, people are going to start looking to see how Mr. Cantor stacked up.”
Cantor, 48, indeed, has toiled mightily to establish support among Tea Party activists.
He pulled out of debt-limit talks with Vice-President Joe Biden a few weeks ago when taxes were on the table. And he pretty much shot down a developing compromise with the White House being crafted by John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives.
There is talk of growing tensions between Cantor and Boehner, who’s had some private, one-on-one meetings with U.S. President Barack Obama over raising the country’s debt ceiling to avoid the fiscal catastrophe that could wait the U.S. if it defaults on its loans.
Obama himself reportedly exploited the apparent rift between the two men in a recent White House meeting, slapping Cantor down when the congressman suggested the White House hadn’t put its debt-slashing ideas on paper for Republicans. In fact, Obama pointed out, he’d given them to Boehner and assumed Boehner had shared them with Cantor and other leading Republicans.
The two men certainly have different styles. Cantor is bespectacled, buttoned-down and known for his condescending sneer when dismissing the debt reduction ideas floated by Democrats and the White House. He’s also frequently shared details of the negotiations with the media.
The 61-year-old Boehner, meantime, is a legislator more in the old-fashioned mould, a back-slapping deal-maker who’s also circumspect when it comes to sharing details about ongoing negotiations.
In an interview airing on CBS News on Wednesday, Obama said he liked and trusted Boehner.
“I do trust that when John tells me something, he means it,” Obama said. “I think that his challenge right now is inside his caucus. I think his challenge is that a party that has gained power making very hard ideological statements, that they’re having trouble now because they’re kind of boxed in.”
Cantor, for his part, has dismissed any notion of problems between the two men.
“I know y’all love to write the soap opera here, and it’s just that,” he said earlier this week.
Not surprisingly, for every anti-spending conservative delighted by Cantor’s stance, there’s an infuriated progressive.
“Unlike Boehner, who seems to have the quaint idea that voters sent him to Washington to solve problems, Cantor is a faithful medium for channelling the Tea Party’s anti-Washington wrath,” says Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
Marshall made reference to a futile Confederate charge against Union forces during the Civil War largely considered an avoidable mistake from which the Southern war effort never truly recovered.
“Eric Cantor imagines the public is behind him on taxes. More likely, he’s saddling up to lead a fiscal reprisal of Picketts’ Charge.”
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