Posted on 11/05/2008 10:16:41 AM PST by BGHater
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) will run for House minority whip in the next Congress, a source in his office told The Hill on Wednesday.
Cantor, the Republicans' chief deputy whip, will challenge Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) for the position.
The shake-up marks the beginning of a reshuffling of House Republican leadership after Tuesday night’s losses to Democrats in congressional districts throughout the country.
Rep. Adam Putnam (Fla.) announced his retirement as head of the House Republican Conference. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Texas), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, has announced he will seek Putnam’s position, the third-ranking in the GOP caucus.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) has indicated he will again look to head up House Republicans' efforts in the next Congress.
Cantor is the man.
Start your evening prayers tonight.
Cantor for Speaker of the House in 2010.
Cantor ping.
Cantor is popular here in formerly red VA. He’s one of our shining future stars.
blood bath ensues... think of it like chemotherapy to cure the GOP cancer...
Not happy about Cantor’s support for the bail-out, but since its all about CHANGE now, BRING IT ON!!!
The next leaders of the party are (in no particular order):
Palin
Pawlenty
Cantor
Ryan
Jindal
Romney
Petraeus
Huckabee
The elder statesmen/wise old men of our party are:
Gingrich
Steele
Thompson
The relief pitchers in our party are:
Giuliani
Ridge
McCain
Eric Cantor seemed like an up and coming player in the GOP House. That is, until he supported the huge federal interventionist bailout of WallSt. Big black mark on his record. The GOP needs leaders who will oppose liberalism and advance conservatism. Not people who go along to get along.
Does anybody know his ACU rating?
After last night's bloodbath the GOP should start with new leadership top to bottom; House, Senate and Party.
Mike Pence needs the the minority leader in the House. He’s the only one who truly defines the conservative message.
I really like Cotter..Kotter...I can’t really remember the name right..but he came out hard against the bailout and seems really smart and conservative.
I'm afraid your list is very weak. Not enough conservatives.
We don't need anymore of McCain. Same goes for liberals Giuliani, Romney and Ridge. Cantor sold out on the bailout. Huckabee is all wrong. Pawlenty is a wimp. General Petraeus is a great American, but I don't know enough about his politics to call him a conservative leader.
He's as conservative as he is smart.
Rudy Takala
August 3, 2006
NewsWithViews.com
There are few desirable candidates seeking political offices this year, something we can attribute to the fact that monarchs within the party establishments chose who would be allowed to run in most elections. Our plight is hardly worth expounding on. As we peer into the future, however, we should realize that even worse candidates will be upon us in 2008.
Republicans appear hell bent on emulating every Democratic president the nation has had since 1940. The current president has managed to outspend LBJ, but he hasn’t managed to act as a flamboyant moral degenerate. This is a flaw that some Republicans will attempt to rectify in the next election. Generally all of the names we see mentioned as potential candidates for president will disturb any person who is reasonably informed. However, I continue to see one name floated about that I find particularly atrocious.
That is Newt Gingrich’s. In a straw poll held at Minnesota’s state Republican convention, he received 39% of the vote — more than twice as much as Senator George Allen, who came in at second place. He has won similarly in several other straw polls across the nation.
Tom Coburn, now a Senator in Oklahoma, was elected to the U.S. House in 1994. He left in 2000 due to a pledge that he would only run for three terms, but in the course of his six years in the House, he witnessed the rise and demise of the Republican revolution. He wrote about his experiences–prominent among them his encounters with Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House–in a book, Breach of Trust. I am going to quote from the portion that outlines its demise (it begins around page seventy of a 270-page book).
“The last bill to be taken up before the two-week Easter recess [in 1997] was a bill that would have trashed one of the key items in the Contract with America. In 1995, we passed a bill that cut committee spending by a third. Now, only two years later, leadership had decided to increase committee spending by nearly 15 percent. Many of my colleagues were incensed that we were so casually going back on our word.”
Fortunately, the bill failed by a vote of 213 to 210. “A few minutes [after the vote], the whip’s office announced a mandatory meeting of the conference… it was immediately obvious Newt Gingrich was furious… Gingrich said every Republican would be meeting… even if he had to send the sergeant at arms—the police—to track members down. Senior Republicans had never heard of a mandatory conference before.”
According to Coburn, Gingrich said, “The eleven geniuses who thought they knew more than the rest of the Congress are going to come up and explain their votes… Those of you who had planned to go to [Representative] John Kasich’s wedding on Saturday are not going. No one is going anywhere until we get the votes we need to pass this rule.”
Representative Steve Largent wrote about the meeting in his diary: “[Gingrich’s] speech began by praising the moderates for voting with the team… He said he never wanted to hear from ‘you conservatives’ about the moderates going south on the party. (Interesting to me to hear Newt refer to us as ‘you conservatives.’)… He also suggested if we didn’t want to go along we should consider becoming independents and form our own party.”
Lee Howell, Newt’s press secretary in 1974, once observed, “Very candidly, I don’t think that Newt Gingrich has many principles, except for what’s best for him, guiding him.”
Politics aside, there’s also Newt’s personal life. It’s one of those cases where morals don’t apply so long as you belong to the right party. The thrice-married Gingrich, according to his former campaign treasurer L.H. Carter, justified his first divorce with the statement: “She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the President. And besides, she has cancer.”
The second divorce, as most will remember, took place in 1999, after the discovery of Newt’s five year affair with an intern twenty-three years his junior. Another observation of Lee Howell’s was, “Newt Gingrich has a tendency to chew people up and spit them out. He uses you for all it’s worth, and when he doesn’t need you anymore he throws you away.”
But then again, that’s in sync with the spirit of today’s Republican Party. Thanks to amoral liberal converts from the Democratic Party, the Republicans are a party without any standards or morals. This is a topic I would like to expand upon in the future; for now, suffice it to say that we don’t need another Bill Clinton for president – even if his name is Newt Gingrich, and even if he has an R next to his name.
2007-100, 2006-92 Livetime (7 years) 97; he's on the ACU's standouts list.
As we know from the many Cantor for VP threads, that won't satisfy many "true" conservatives.
That is outstanding
Cantor offered a common sense conservative alternative to the bailout. The Dems/W. refused to give any thought to it.
There are a lot of GOP to blame for the bailout, but Cantor is way down on the list.
Cantor is my congressman and I’ve always been a big supporter, but he messed up when he voted for the bailout.
He voted for the bailout twice and is as equally as guilty as the rest of them.
98% — 100% or so ACU rating.
I was not a fan of the bail out, but reasonable minds could differ on the strategy. Cantor took a pragmatic approach — which, while I disagreed with it, is defensible.
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