Matt Yglesias

Eric Cantor Bashes, Tries to Take Credit for, High-Speed Rail

Extension of the existing Northeast Corridor high-speed rail south from Washington, DC to Richmond, Virginia and then onward into North Carolina is clearly something that would be beneficial to the state of Virginia. Virginia has experience a lot of economic growth in the past 15-20 years that’s mostly been driven by those portions of the state that fall within the orbit of the Washington, DC metro area. There have also been recent, and not especially successful, efforts to leverage the money generated by that growth into enhanced prosperity for other regions of the state. A better approach than much of what’s been done would be to expend funds on building better transportation links between the DC area and other population centers in the state.

That’s exactly what the HSR expansion plan would do, so it’s not surprising to see Rep Eric Cantor (R-VA) trying to hop on the bandwagon (or locomotive, as the case may be):

Yesterday, though, the Henrico County Republican said bringing high-speed rail to the region could further spur economic development, creating as many as 185,000 jobs and bringing $21.2 billion to a region already home to about a half-dozen Fortune 500 companies and 20,000 small businesses.

“If there is one thing that I think all of us here on both sides of the political aisle from all parts of the region agree with, it’s that we need to do all we can to promote jobs here in the Richmond area,” Cantor said.

But of course Cantor voted against the federal legislation that’s making increased HSR capacity possible. Indeed, on Meet The Press he specifically singled-out the HSR provisions for inaccurate, demagogic mockery, repeating the myth that the Recovery Act contained a provision for a “train from Disneyland to Las Vegas” that was an example of the “waste and pork-barrel spending” said to typify the package.

Back in his district, of course, Cantor wants to portray himself as an agent for constructive change in Virginia. But you can’t be a constructive agent for change if you’re busy lying constantly and opposing everything.

GOP Leadership Rivals Throw Mike Pence Under the Bus

I’ve seen a lot of people link to this Glenn Thrush Politico item, but I have a slightly different take on it:

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) raised objections to an abbreviated alternative budget “blueprint” released today — but were told by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) they needed to back the plan, according to several Republican sources. [...] “In his egocentric rush to get on camera, Mike Pence threw the rest of the Conference under the bus, specifically Paul Ryan, whose staff has been working night and day for weeks to develop a substantive budget plan,” said a GOP aide heavily involved in budget strategy. [...] “It’s categorically untrue,” said Pence spokesman Matt Lloyd. “Cantor as well as Ryan and the rest of the leadership have been part of this process for weeks. They not only signed off on it, but their staffs helped edit it.”

To me the salient point here is that Pence’s spokesman is almost certainly telling the truth here, and the Cantor and Ryan staffers saying otherwise are almost certainly lying. As a simple matter of logic, Thrush’s item doesn’t really make sense. Look at the problems the majority party has keeping its caucus on message and united on matters of tactics and substance. There’s no way John Boehner could possibly force Reps Ryan and Cantor to endorse his joke of a budget if they didn’t want to.

Rather, Reps Ryan and Cantor saw that the press was reacting poorly to the Boehner/Pence flim-flam “budget” and decided to throw their colleagues under the bus. And, frankly, I’m not surprised that Ryan and Cantor were surprised. I was surprised, too. I’ve never really seen political reporters get outraged before about the fact that a policy document makes no sense in the past. It was a curious outbreak of substance among the press corps that I don’t think was particularly foreseeable.

The Gingrich Doctrine and the 21st Century

My colleague Satyam Khanna notes some of the broader context for the revelation that Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) is explicitly modeling his tactics on Newt Gingrich’s obstructionism in 1993-94.

In Washington, coverage of politics is dominated by politics rather than the policy consequences of politics. Thus, because of the outcome of the 1994 elections, Gingrich’s 93-94 tactics are held to have been a great success. But it’s important to be clear—those tactics included lockstep opposition to a Clinton economic program whose opponents set it would wreck the economy, but in fact laid the groundwork for years of prosperity. Gingrich’s success in blocking health care reform has been a small but persistent drag on the economy whose negative impact has compounded each and every year for the past fifteen years and has led to the preventable deaths of thousands and thousands of people at a minimum. Politics is politics and I understand that, but anyone who looks to that era as something to be emulated is dangerously indifferent to the real-world implications of congressional behavior.

Meanwhile, the political contexts of the two eras strike me as different in a number of ways. Bill Clinton’s 43 percent share of the popular vote in the 1992 election made it plausible to believe that the center of public opinion was amenable to the idea that the President’s agenda needed curtailing. What’s more, the Democrats gained zero Senate seats and actually lost nine House seats. Under the circumstances, you can see why conservative felt emboldened. And their political strategy had a clear logic to it—a large number of Democrats in congress were representing constituencies that had pretty consistently been trending to the right in presidential politics since the 1960s. With a Democrat in the White House, the chance existed for a spirit of feisty opposition to force the voters in such constituencies to align their congressional preferences with their presidential ones.

That’s simply not the case this year. Not only did Obama have a more decisive win (obviously the absence of a third-party candidate is important here) but the Democratic caucus is more compact and includes many fewer outlier members whose constituencies are dramatically more conservative than the national electorate that backed Obama in November.

Of course, nobody can know what the results of all this will be, and objective occurrences in the world will have a large impact completely independently of the quality of Rep. Cantor’s tactical decisionmaking. But it does seem worth noting that the Virginia Republican Party, of which Cantor is a part, has not been a huge font of electoral success in recent years. Instead, the right-wing of the VA party has, with incredible speed and efficiency, turned one of the most solidly Republican states in the country into one with a decidedly blueish hue. When Mark Warner was elected governor in 2001, it was seen as a stroke of political genius to be able to carry the state. Then came Tim Kaine in 2005 and Jim Webb in 2006. In 2008, Democrats went from a 3-8 split of the state’s House seats to a 6-5 split. Warner became the state’s second Democratic Senator in a race that nobody paid any attention to because the state party had essentially thrown the election months earlier by driving their potentially electable candidate out of the race and throwing the nomination to a guy everyone knew would get his ass kicked.

In other words, though Gingrichism was politically successful in the mid-1990s, the record of Cantorism in the 21st century has been much weaker.