Free Republic

A post-election survey found that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-VA) support for amnesty legislation influenced a majority of voters who ousted him last week in Virginia's seventh congressional district primary that blindsided the mainstream media and rocked establishment Washington.

Dear Friend, The conservative principles you and I believe in are in danger. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are crisscrossing America raising millions of dollars from rich liberals. They now have $11 million more on hand. In 12 days we face a critical deadline: the June End of Quarter FEC Fundraising Deadline. We must end strong to stay close with Pelosi’s campaign machine. This is critical to increasing our majority in the House this November. (SNIP) The deadline is just days away. After the VA scandal, Benghazi, the IRS targeting conservatives, and the Obama Administration trading away 5 Taliban Terrorist...

On Monday, despite House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-VA) shocking primary loss last week that was viewed as a referendum against amnesty legislation, former Mississippi Governor and lobbyist Haley Barbour said the House could still pass amnesty legislation this year. "I don't think Eric's loss should have anything to do with it," Barbour said at the New York Meeting before pushing for a bill that would give a pathway to citizenship to "everybody's who's here illegally" so long as they confess they are in America illegally, pay fines and back taxes, and are put on probation. Barbour said the House...

On the leadership race in the House to find a replacement for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who lost his primary election last week, King stressed a pledge he made that he would not vote for any member of Congress who supports amnesty. King accused House Speaker John Boehner of attempting to engineer the leadership vote to replace Cantor in favor of House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, an establishment GOP leader in Washington that King identified as part of the problem, not the solution. “Boehner gave McCarthy a full day to organize before the rest of us in the GOP...

It’s now clear why the primary defeat of the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, came so completely out of the blue last week: Beltway blindness that put a focus on fund-raising, power-brokering and partisan back-and-forth created a reality distortion field that obscured the will of the people. But that affliction was not Mr. Cantor’s alone; it is shared by the political press. Reporters and commentators might want to pause and wipe the egg off their faces before they go on camera to cluck-cluck about how Mr. Cantor, Republican of Virginia, missed signs of the insurgency that took him out. There...

The drive-by media is desperately trying to prove that Eric Cantor lost in the primary because he's Jewish, never mind the fact that the same 7th district in Virginia had elected him repeatedly before, despite knowing that he was Jewish. The truth is a little different:And no, the image doesn't mean Cantor lost because racist. It means that he lost because, despite calling himself a Republican and putting up a decent defense against Obama in 2009, Cantor's position on amnesty has become indistinguishable from Obama's. When that's combined with the images of Latin American young people, many of them ill,...

-snip- Cantor was fairly placid during his appearance on ABC’s “This Week” and in an earlier interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” but bristled when ABC correspondent asked him about Ingraham.Cantor zeroed in on Ingraham’s charge that he was “two-faced” and a “phony” on the issue of immigration reform because he touted himself as an opponent of amnesty but also worked on legislation to grant legal status to young illegal immigrants.Ingraham joked that Cantor should have been traded to the Taliban in exchange for American POW Bowe Bergdahl, who is accused of deserting his combat post in Afghanistan.“That suggestion...

Outgoing Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told ABC's Jonathan Karl that he was "absolutely" shocked by his primary loss this week to Tea Party challenger David Brat, a defeat that has sent shockwaves through Washington as the man seen as a possible heir to Speaker John Boehner was dethroned. "Absolutely…I don't think anybody in the country thought that the outcome would be what it was. And, you know, I just am a believer, as I said that night, and subsequently, that there are some things that happen for a reason and we may not be able to really discern...

The following is mostly satire. Hillary Clinton, the Prince Charles of American politics (in more ways than one), has a new book out that she’s busy promoting. It’s called “Hard Choices.” She said, for example, her most difficult choice on the night of the Benghazi consulate attack was whether to have scotch, vodka or gin. In one interview, Hillary said that when she and Bill left the White House they were “flat broke.” She admitted to one interviewer that, "all the silverware we took from the White House were practically worthless". To escape their positively Dickensian condition, Hillary tried her...

They are Very Concerned about the extremists taking over or something. Here’s the NY Times Editorial Board The forces of political nihilism not only remain alive and well within the Republican Party, but they are on the rise. Witness the way they shook Washington on Tuesday by removing from power Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who had been one of the most implacable opponents to the reform of immigration, health care and taxation. His crime (in addition to complacent campaigning)? He was occasionally obliged, as a leader, to take a few minimalist steps toward governing, like raising the debt...

As the fallout from Rep. Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) stunning primary loss continues to settle, one of the many entrenched interests feeling suddenly insecure about their position in the American hierarchy is big business. For some, like the aviation giant Boeing, Cantor was a reliable friend. With his loss, that company’s prospects, along with its share price, have crumpled. “Mr. Cantor’s loss is much more than just symbolism,” the Times reported on Saturday. “He has been one of Wall Street’s most reliable benefactors in Congress. And Mr. Brat used that fact to deride the majority leader as someone who has rigged...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Sunday he will vote for Dave Brat, the man who ended his career in Congress, but stopped short of congratulating him or mentioning his name. Cantor, who lost to Brat despite outspending by a margin of 26 to 1, stressed the importance of keeping the Republican Party unified, a message he stressed to Tea Party conservatives in the House after the 2013 government shutdown. Cantor said keeping his seat, Virginia’s 7th congressional district, in Republican hands is a priority and that’s why he’ll vote for Brat, who pummeled him mercilessly on the campaign...

That's how many people it took to bring down House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, doom immigration reform and leave all but the most tea-sodden Republicans quaking. No, it wasn't the Democrats who did it. Various complicated analyses of voting patterns confirm what anyone who has ever tried to convince even their own mother to vote "strategically" knows: Voters don't work that way. They may cast their vote to send a message — that happens all the time — but not to execute a strategy that depends on their voting for someone they don't like at all so that someone else...

Last night I posted what I thought was a very balanced comment on the 7th district congressional election. I expressed my personal disappointment that Eric Cantor lost, congratulated David Brat on his victory, and expressed concern over the deep divisions that currently exist in our party. I encourage you to read the comments that were made in response. The negativity and vitriol of these comments (dare I say the hate in some of them) reflects what is wrong in our party right now. We have to learn to disagree without being disagreeable, and we have to learn to respect the...

Top Jeb Bush adviser Mike Murphy, who did not even pay attention to Dave Brat's campaign like Breitbart News did, has falsely been claiming that Cantor's embrace of amnesty for illegal immigrants was not the reason he lost last Tuesday. Liberal writer Mickey Kaus had enough of Murphy's nonsense and slammed him on Twitter on Friday evening. Kaus became Brat's de facto press secretary and top advocate on Twitter in the last months of the campaign because Kaus, like Brat, opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants because it would hurt American workers. He mentioned to Murphy that talk radio host Laura...

Eric Cantor, next Republican National Committee chairman? Former RNC chair Michael Steele thinks it's a possibility after the House majority leader was defeated Tuesday in a Virginia Republican primary. "With the upcoming presidential election, there's a lot of interest in Eric Cantor serving as national chairman of the RNC," Steele said Saturday on MSNBC's "Up With Steve Kornacki.""In fact I think he'd be interesting because he started dialogues on poverty and some other issues that were sort of outside of what Republicans have traditionally talked about. So he could bring a very interesting voice into that space," he said. (VIDEO-AT-LINK)

The official topic of the conference, emblazoned on materials handed out to guests gathered here at a luxury Norwegian-inspired resort, was “The Future of American Leadership.” But the unofficial theme was made clear not long into breakfast on Friday, when a guest asked Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky the question on everyone’s mind: Is Hillary beatable?(SNIP) “This is the place where, I believe, the future of the party is really going to come out of,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a New York hedge fund manager and former Romney fund-raising bundler. “This is the Republican Party’s Bell Labs. This is our R...

Most of us are still trying to figure out exactly what was behind Eric Cantor’s shocking primary loss on Tuesday. But some on the left were able to jump to conclusions almost immediately after the election. Their hypothesis? Eric Cantor is a victim of Tea Party anti-Semitism. Even ignoring the fact that Dave Brat was not technically a Tea Party candidate, the theory has zero supporting evidence. It is ridiculous to suggest that a district that has been electing Cantor since 2000 recently developed a case of raging anti-Semitism. This is a case of liberals assuming that everyone is as...

The Democratic presidential prospect could have demographics on her side.The best news for Hillary Rodham Clinton this week wasn't the mostly positive reviews for her memoir Hard Choices. It was the hard fall taken by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor when he was ousted by a tea-party challenger who denounced him as insufficiently conservative, particularly on immigration. The Virginia Republican's defeat virtually extinguishes the already flickering chances that House Republicans will pass immigration reform before the 2014 election, and even dims the odds that the chamber will take action before 2016. And that significantly improves prospects in the next presidential...

Many liberals privately mourn the departure of Eric Cantor from the ranks of the House GOP leadership. At a symposium on “Voting in America,” several of the attendees told me that they and Majority Leader Cantor were within striking distance of a compromise to restore many of the provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were struck down by the Supreme Court last year as unconstitutional. The Court ruled that certain provisions that singled out certain states and jurisdictions for special oversight based on 50-year-old data were obsolete and could no longer be justified. Liberal civil-rights groups were furious...