Free Republic

Incoming Virginia congressman Dave Brat, whose historic GOP primary victory over then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor shook up Washington’s power structure this summer, is blasting President Obama’s executive fiat on immigration reform as "morally vacuous" – while stopping short of calling for impeachment.

GOP members have released their draft amendment to defund President Barack Obama’s national amnesty. “None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available, including any funds or fees collected or otherwise made available for expenditure, by this division or any other Act, or otherwise available to the Secretary of Homeland Security, for any fiscal year may be used to implement, administer, carry out, or enforce the [amnesty] policies,” says the short amendment. The new anti-amnesty language is being pushed by Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon, South Carolina’s Rep. Mick Mulvaney and Virginia Rep. Dave Brat, who unseated the GOP’s pro-amnesty majority...

Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), who shockingly toppled former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in a primary this summer, says he'll support John Boehner (R-Ohio) for Speaker. Brat told The Hill he plans to vote for Boehner on the floor in January when the Speaker is elected by the full House for the new Congress. "As of right now, yeah," Brat said. "I'm optimistic our leadership's going to move forward on the principles I ran on."

David Brat, the Republican who unseated ex-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in June, cruised to victory Tuesday night, according to multiple news outlets. Brat, who faced off with Democrat Jack Trammell, won the race for Virginia’s 7th congressional district. Despite both teaching at Randolph-Macon College, the two presented a different vision for America’s future while courting voters. Brat rode a wave of tea-party backed support to a stunning upset of Cantor last summer and is favored to win the heavily Republican 7th Congressional District in central Virginia, which includes the Richmond-area suburbs. Brat repeatedly played up his role as an...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)In an exclusive interview Wednesday with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for accepting a multimillion-dollar job with a Wall Street investment bank shortly after leaving Congress. "This is wrong," Warren said in regard to Cantor's new role as vice chairman and managing director at Moelis & Co. "People work in Washington and, man, they hit that revolving door with a speed that would blind you." She went on to claim that banks hire politicians like Cantor "not because they bring great expertise and insight, but because they’re selling...

Late Monday night it was reported that former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor would take a job at investment bank Moelis.The news has already prompted the predictable eye-rolling about the "revolving door." And to the Tea Partiers who ousted Cantor in a primary earlier this year, the news that he is going to Wall Street is vindication that he was never a populist like them.But anyway, Moelis has put in a filing with the SEC, detailing his pay package (Via Erik Schatzker).From the filing:Group LP has agreed to pay Mr. Cantor an annual base salary of $400,000. Group LP has...

Eric Cantor just announced that he is quitting his House seat on August 18. The remainder of his term is likely to be filled by a special election held on the same day as the election for the next term. It’s almost certain that Dave Brat, the Republican firebrand who beat Cantor in the primary, will win both and take office immediately after November 4. Why did Cantor quit? There are three reasons, and Larry Sabato notwithstanding, “generosity” to his successor isn’t one of them. 1) He’s given up on the lame duck session. The last week of this legislative...

RICHMOND, Va. – U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor tells a Virginia newspaper he will resign his seat in the House of Representatives months earlier than expected.

Virginia state Republican lawmakers have lost one of their most reliable sources of campaign cash with U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's defeat in a GOP primary contest last month. Cantor's campaign account and the Cantor-controlled 7th District Republican Committee have given more than $700,000 directly to Republican state candidates since Cantor was first elected to Congress in 2000. That is according to campaign finance reports compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit that tracks political contributions. Helping Cantor help state politicians were big-name donors from around the country attracted by the majority leader's former star power. They...

The Washington Post reported Friday that party players who were supporting soon-to-be-former Congressman Eric Cantor have pulled a fast one on the man who defeated him. Last week during a 7th District Committee meeting in Virginia, “Cantor loyalists who still sit on the 7th District Committee outmaneuvered Brat supporters to strip the committee of most of its budget — nearly $400,000.” According to the Washington Post, a parliamentary maneuver allowed the money to be moved so that Brat’s campaign couldn’t use it. Brat was to use the money for a get out the vote campaign. The move may assist the...

Truth is one of the most powerful forces on earth. And perhaps the force most feared by compromised politicians. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's crushing defeat came at the hands of a virtual unknown college professor, one who overcame a 26 to 1 funding disadvantage in which 377 Political Action Committees (PACs) contributed to Cantor’s 2014 campaign vs. 0 (zero) PAC contributions into Brat's 2014 campaign. It's been borderline hilarious watching so many media talking heads, politicians and campaign consultants grasp at explanatory straws. It reminds me of Mark Twain's quote, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If...

U.S. Representative Eric Cantor’s recent primary loss to free market economics professor David Brat has forced academics to take another look at the TEA Party. “They are very suspicious of liberal professors and believe most of academia is dominated by liberal professors,” Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol claims. “But they would know the difference in their district, and they wouldn’t disrespect somebody just because they were a professor, if they had the appropriate ideas.” david brat “It’s not so much an animosity toward higher education, per se, and more toward a cultural elitism among liberals and concerns about liberal biases,” Ruth...

The other night, in the wake of Eric Cantor’s epic loss to Dave Brat, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews appeared with the left-wing news channel’s new kid on the block, Ronan Farrow. Farrow was talking about how surprised he was that a Tea Party guy like Brat could be seemed to be so smart. After all, it’s simply shocking that someone so conservative is capable of making cogent arguments! -SNIP- Hell may have frozen over, because Matthews is just plain sick of people looking down on the Tea Party: -SNIP- This looking down our noses at the Tea Party people has got...

Bob Woodward came close. Oh so close to discerning how much of the mainstream media were blindsided by the stunning defeat of former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his congressional primary in Virginia. In fact, Woodward came so close that your humble correspondent thought he was going to say it out loud today while being interviewed by CNN's Candy Crowley on State of the Union. Instead Woodward skipped the real reason and gave the secondary reason for neglect of this story. Woodward did mention that too many reporters don't like to do the hard footwork to investigate stories in...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer chose an interesting path and offered puzzling critiques since he tossed his name in the hat for a potential presidential run in 2016. But comments the Democrat made about Rep. Eric Cantor and Sen. Dianne Feinstein in a lengthy profile published by National Journal have probably knocked him off that path. In the piece, Schweitzer shared his perceptions on Cantor's sexuality while discussing the Virginia Republican's shocking loss last week against an unknown primary candidate. “If you were just a regular person, you turned on the TV, and you saw Eric Cantor talking, I would...

The big political news from last week was David Brat’s upset win over Eric Cantor for Congress. Brat is an economics professor at Randolph Macon and from his research it’s clear that he has strong political views embedded in his economics. It’s perfectly fine to be a political economist, but when it leads to an obviously flawed understanding and presentation of reality then it becomes a real problem in my opinion. For instance, in his website Brat says the following: “Our national debt has skyrocketed, reaching over $17 trillion dollars. What our leaders in Washington fail to mention is...

The Eric Cantor debacle in Virginia last week demanded a storyline, which was no heavy lifting. In the GOP primary a political newbie had wiped the floor with the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Bring on the analysts to find the narrative in the rebuke administered, a rather remote if hard-working political power broker linked more frequently -- here comes the dichotomy -- with Wall Street than Main Street. Cantor, on these terms, updated Cardinal Wolsey's Shakespearean lament from "Henry VIII": "Had I but served my district with half the zeal/I served the Chamber of Commerce...

One of economic professor David Brat’s central criticisms of Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor was that the House majority leader was too cozy with big business, leaving him more concerned about his relationships with K Street lobbyists than with his constituents. Although there are many reasons for Cantor’s shocking defeat last week, Brat’s attacks on the appearance of “crony capitalism” do seem to have resonated with voters in Virginia’s 7th District. Cantor’s ouster forced House Republicans to choose a new leader, and all signs suggest that they will choose House Whip Kevin McCarthy, who has launched an aggressive campaign for the...

Rep. Raul Labrador, the Idaho Republican running for House majority leader, presided over chaos at this weekend's state GOP convention in Moscow, which abruptly adjourned Saturday after he failed to broker an agreement between the party's warring factions.

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...