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House Majority Leader Defeated In Primary
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in United States political history, the House Majority Leader has been defeated in his primary election. Long time Republican congressman and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated by 10 percentage points in the Virginia primary by Republican Tea Party challenger Dave Brat. This shocking defeat is likely to upset the political balance of power in the United States for years to come."
I don't know the rules in Virginia, but can't he run as a third-party candidate in the general election, just like Lieberman did?
In California for state legislature we switched to an open primary in the spring and runoff in the fall, where the runoff is the top two candidates regardless of party. so in very conservative areas the top two candidates could be two republicans, and in liberal areas the top two candidates will be democrats. This has the effect of pushing the most polarized districts to more moderate representation, because if two repubs are in the final election, the more moderate one will appeal to a wider base.
this is so important because california's legislature is so horribly disfunctional, and because you need 2/3 vote to pass any bill that levies taxes, it means a minority can basically shut down regular operation.
btdubs this was just one of the reforms passed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who I think will be remembered as one of the best governors in CA history.
Nope. Here's a direct quote from one of my conservative mailing lists.
"I'm with you; these moderate-to-left RINO old farts have to go."
Apparently he wasn't far enough right.
"Cantor opposes public funding of embryonic stem cell research and opposes elective abortion. He is rated 100% by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) and 0% by NARAL Pro-Choice America, indicating a pro-life voting record. He is also opposed to same-sex marriage, voting to Constitutionally define marriage as between a male and a female in 2006. In November 2007 he voted against prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation. He also supports making flag burning illegal. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) rated him 19% in 2006, indicating an anti-affirmative action voting record. He is opposed to gun control, voting to ban product misuse lawsuits on gun manufacturers in 2005, and he voted not to require gun registration and trigger-lock laws in the District of Columbia. He has a rating of "A" from the National Rifle Association (NRA).[32] On Nov. 2, 2010, Cantor told Wolf Blitzer of CNN that he would try to trim the federal deficit by reducing welfare."
And I hear this puts the former republican stronghold district in play for the democrats now. Plus a tremendous loss of seniority and political power for the republicans will be gone so spending in Virginia is likely to drop significantly.
I'm an independent with increasingly strong liberal tendencies since 2004. But I'm not sure if I'm really growing more liberal or if the republicans are simply moving rightward away from the middle.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Republicans are falling victim to their own success redistricting. The result is safe districts where the nominee has no need for independent voters to win in the general election. The party nomination effectively becomes the election and in these, candidates are much more vulnerable to small groups of highly motivated, very vocal and very involved fringe groups, then they would be in general elections. Democrats engage in this behavior as well but for better of for worst, they are not as good at gerrymandering when they get the chance.
Republican voting base has gone full bat shit, the party won't last much longer now.
The Tea Party may be trying to spin this into a "win" (since they've been soundly defeated elsewhere this primary season) but at the end of the day this really comes down to Politics 101. Mr. Cantor was more interested in running the House than he was in providing consistent services. Drill past the national media's obsession with the Tea Party and/or immigration for a moment and look at the local media in his district. Read some of the complaints about him that have nothing whatsoever to do with ideology. Then ask yourself how frequently incumbent Legislators manage to lose primary elections, particularly ones in a leadership role that give them all manner of opportunity to funnel pork (err, I mean "investment") to the folks back home.
All politics are local. The Tea Party didn't win this. Mr. Cantor lost it. The funny/sad (depends on your perspective I guess) thing is he probably didn't see it coming until the first returns started coming in. This is what happens when you've held elective office long enough to treat elections like mere formalities.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
What's wrong is to have state-sponsored open primaries. That's fundamentally anti-democratic. Why should the state organize primaries for only 2 parties? There are dozens of small parties out there which would like to receive the same treatment. Parties should organize primaries themselves.
Romney hinted at this in one of the Presidential debates, with a line about too big to fail that was predictably ignored by the mainstream media. George Will picked up on it in one of his op-eds. Will has written extensively on the subject of crony capitalism, with a focus on the unholy alliance of business and regulators. Will speaks for the intellectual wing of the GOP, such as it is, so it's not as though they aren't aware of this problem.
Romney was probably the wrong person to try and make this argument, though it would have been refreshing to see him try. I can't recall him saying anything on the matter other than the throw away line about too big to fail, which is a pity, because it's an issue he could have made headway on.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"Just that simple"? You like the idea of closing borders, evidently, but do you like the idea of produce prices, meat prices, service-economy costs, and just about every other menial-labor field seeing its labor costs double overnight? Because that's the consequence of requiring that citizens do those jobs. Stoop work is awful, backbreaking work that pays bullshit. It only survives because the immigrants who do it are so desperate for the work that they'll take it.
The moment you kick the immigrants out, you see cases like these ones, where billions of dollars of produce were left to rot in the fields because all the immigrants who would have picked them were driven out by tough anti-immigrant laws.
The US agricultural economy -- and a lot of the service economy -- is built on a steady influx of sub-minimum-wage labor, and only survives because of undocumented immigrants. Take it away, and large swaths of the economy collapse.
Whatever happened to "Give me your tired, your poor, your labored masses yearning to be free?" Heard a story about the approximately 40,000 children who came to the US without their parents who are current being held in custody because we have little legal framework for dealing with cross border teenaged runaways. Deport them? They're minors, and some of them are claiming outright refugee status because they feared for their lives at home due to gang violence. Send them to orphanages? They have none of the paperwork for that. It's a total clusterfuck right now. We can either pretend these kids are here to steal our freedoms, or or we can tackle the reality we're given and stay true to the promise of America.
My ancestors came over to the US as 16 and 19-year-old brothers with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a wish to own their own farm. A century later and we're a family of doctors, lawyers, educators, and software developers. They spoke no English - now I speak no Russian or German. They formed their own ethnic enclave with others like them out in the midwest, but my generation has become mobile and we've fully scattered and integrated across the country. Why did my teenage ancestors deserve that chance, but these kids don't?
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Thank you for the perspective.
Here's what I'm seeing from the outside:
I'm no detective, but the footprints look pretty darn clear to me.
"BTW, I consider anybody who uses the "teabagger" name a dishonest broker and liberal robot. If you start by trying to offend your opponent (and make no mistake, this term is intended to offend) you really must have nothing better to say"
I'm gonna let you chew on that statement for a while...
I think I heard Brat spent $150k and Cantor spent $100 million. Tea Party is the best thing to happen in politics since any of us have been alive.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock