Tag: eric cantor
Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Takes Job On Wall Street

Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Takes Job On Wall Street

By Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times

Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is moving to Wall Street, taking a job with investment bank Moelis & Co., the firm said.

Cantor, 51 who resigned last month after an upset loss in a Republican primary in June, will be vice chairman and managing director at the 7-year-old company.

The veteran lawmaker “will provide strategic counsel to the firm’s corporate and institutional clients on key issues,” the company said in a news release Monday night. Cantor also “will play a leading role in client development and advise clients on strategic matters,” it said.

“Eric has proven himself to be a pro-business advocate and one who will enhance our boardroom discussions with CEOs and senior management as we help them navigate their most important strategic decisions,” said Ken Moelis, chief executive of the investment bank.

Cantor becomes the latest official to cash in on Wall Street after working in Washington. Last year, former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner joined private equity firm Warburg Pincus.

Cantor was elected to the House from a Richmond, Va., area district in 2001. A strong business advocate, he rose through the leadership ranks and became majority leader when Republicans took control of the House after the 2010 elections.

But Cantor became the first congressional leader in a generation to lose his seat in an election when he was upset in the GOP primary by Dave Brat, who had strong backing from the tea party.

A local college professor, Brat criticized Cantor for working on immigration reform and drew strong support from tea party supporters unhappy that House Republican leaders were not more forcefully opposing President Obama.

With no chance of winning reelection in November, Cantor stepped down as majority leader and was replaced by Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield). Cantor left Congress on Aug. 18. Wall Street was a logical landing spot for Cantor.

During his congressional career, he raised more money — $3 million — from the securities and investment industry than any other sector, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

“When I considered options for the next chapter of my career, I knew I wanted to join a firm with a great entrepreneurial spirit that focused on its clients,” said Cantor, a lawyer and former small businessman.

“The new model of independent banks offering conflict-free advice, in a smaller, more intimate environment, was a place where I knew my skills could help clients succeed,” he said.

AFP Photo/Mark Wilson

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Eric Cantor To Resign From Congress

Eric Cantor To Resign From Congress

Washington (AFP) – Just hours after stepping down as U.S. House majority leader, Republican Representative Eric Cantor announced he would resign from his congressional seat later this month.

Establishment heavyweight Cantor lost his seat to an even more conservative but virtually unknown challenger in a June election amid deep divisions within the Republican Party ahead of November’s congressional vote.

But he had been expected to keep his seat until his term ends in January.

“I want to make sure that the constituents in the Seventh District will have a voice in what will be a very consequential lame-duck session,” Cantor told the Richmond Times-Dispatch late Thursday.

Cantor said he has asked Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe to call a special election for his district coinciding with the November 4 general election.

Holding such a special election for his seat in November would allow the winner to take office immediately, rather than in January with the next congressional session.

“That way he (the winner) will also have seniority, and that will help the interests of my constituents (because) he can be there in that consequential lame-duck session,” Cantor explained.

Kevin McCarthy replaced Cantor as House majority leader.

Cantor, who had been the only Jewish Republican in Congress, has expressed frustration at divisions in Washington and the glacial pace in Congress.

“There is a lot of business that is still to be done,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “I wish that Washington would act quicker.”

Cantor declined to reveal his plans for life after Congress.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

The Democratic Party Is The Only Home For Centrists

The Democratic Party Is The Only Home For Centrists

This is a letter to political centrists.

For those of you alarmed that Rep. Eric Cantor was not conservative enough for Republicans in Virginia’s 7th congressional district, I encourage you to read Charles Wheelan’s The Centrist Manifesto. Wheelan, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, puts to words what we can all sense: Partisan gridlock is becoming more than a nuisance in our lives. It is threatening our economy, our children’s educations, the welfare of the planet, and every other national priority.

Take a read through Wheelan’s “Manifesto.” It’s a short read, published last year after it became clear that President Obama’s re-election would not bring a new age of bipartisanship to Washington. Wheelan calls for the center to step outside of the two major parties and stand up for itself. In noting that the fastest growing bloc of voters is Independents, Wheelan argues that both the Democratic and Republican parties have driven out moderates by standing only for their political bases — and that the only resolution to this is an organized movement of Independents.

Take a read, because Wheelan is wrong.

Wheelan’s vision may have made sense in 2013, but much has changed in the past year. We are now well past the time for quixotic visions of bipartisanship driven by centrists on both sides of the divide. To read “Manifesto” is to recall a time when Americans could reasonably believe that in spite of bitter partisanship in Washington, Congress could transcend the ideological gap to act on immigration reform, universal background checks, and tax reform. To behave, in short, like statesmen.

If we have learned anything from Eric Cantor’s demise, it’s that the Republican Party is no place for pragmatic centrists. It’s not even a place for relentless partisans who may stray from Republican orthodoxy on an issue or two.

So it’s time to just say it out in the open: The resolution to Washington’s dysfunction is a migration of Independents into the Democratic Party, because there is only one side that seems at all interested in welcoming centrists.

We should first note one of the most fundamental rules of political science: Duverger’s Law. This is the observation, made famous by French sociologist Maurice Duverger, that in winner-take-all two-party systems, voters inevitably gravitate toward one of two major parties. This is because voters do not want to waste their vote on a candidate who will not win. Recall how quickly liberal voters snapped back into the Democratic fold after wasting votes on Ralph Nader in 2000; they know Duverger’s Law well.

Given Duverger’s Law, it would follow that any potential “Centrist Party” would run into institutional obstacles not easily surmounted by even the most popular movement. And even those preaching the gospel of bipartisanship, nonpartisanship, and centrism must accept the reality that the current Republican Party is plainly interested in none of that.

This goes for the 501(c)(4) groups like Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us. If you want Congress to move “FWD” on immigration reform, under what circumstance could you expect a GOP-led House to buck the Tea Party and pass a bill that commands broad bipartisan support?

This also goes for moderate voters, whom Wheelan notes comprised 41 percent of the electorate in 2012.

Wheelan correctly observes that any centrist party should not simply meet both sides halfway on each issue, but rather take the best ideas from both sides. A rational observer, for example, would not conclude that climate change is “probably” happening because Democrats are sure it is, and Republicans are sure it’s not.

He also correctly notes that many Democrats have strayed from sensible policies in favor of myopic political interests. But it simply cannot be said that there is no home for centrists in the Democratic Party.

In fact, several prominent Democrats — including Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) — are on record as supporting school choice. Congress passed free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama in 2011 with large numbers of Democratic votes, and President Obama signed them into law. The Obama administration and many of its congressional allies have supported lowering the corporate income tax from 35 percent to 28 percent.

In other words, Democrats often support centrist policies without reprisal. Such apostasy would never be tolerated in the GOP.

Wheelan examines the U.S. Senate in “Manifesto,” and proposes that if moderate members began asserting themselves as independent from their parties, the cogs of Washington may begin to turn again.

“With a mere four or five U.S. Senate seats, the Centrists can deny either traditional party a majority. At that point, the Centrists would be America’s power brokers…good things can start happening again,” Wheelan writes.

He’s right, but who might these four to five senators be? At the moment, they would almost assuredly be Democrats.

Take a look at the vote scoring of the 112th Senate (which ended after the 2012 election,) done by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. The NOMINATE scale, an abbreviation for Nominal Three-Step Estimation, is immensely complex, and explaining it is well beyond the scope of this piece. Please accept for a moment that -1 on the scale is the score of the most liberal senator imaginable, and 1 is the most conservative. Zero is the perfect middle.

You may note the slight asymmetry of the distribution. I would mark the area between -0.25 and 0.25 as centrist territory. Thirteen of these centrists were Democrats, and only five were Republicans. Of these five, only Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Susan Collins (R-ME) remain in the 113th Senate. Murkowski, it should be noted, held on to her seat in 2010 only after a miraculous write-in campaign overruled GOP primary voters, who nominated fringe Tea Party candidate Joe Miller.

You might also note that NOMINATE scores President Obama as being as liberal as Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN) was conservative. Obama commands the approval of nearly 80 percent of Democrats, while Lugar was dismissed by GOP voters in favor of a man who believed that “God’s intent” was for women to bear the children of their rapists.

A Pew Research Center poll released this week found that 82 percent of “consistently liberal” respondents said they would like elected officials to make compromises; only 14 percent said they would prefer that elected officials stick to their positions. When offered the same dichotomy, “consistently conservative” respondents said they would prefer elected officials hold fast to their views by a 63 to 32 percent margin.

This Republican intransigence left Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, two of the most prominent scholars of the Senate, to place the blame for Washington’s dysfunction squarely on the GOP in their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.

“When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges,” Mann and Ornstein write.

Of course, we recently had two years of almost unfettered Democratic control in Washington. Was the record of the 111th Congress, which reigned in 2009 and 2010, perfect? Of course not. But it got things done, including passing a markedly centrist health care bill that has expanded coverage to more than 10 million people to date.

It got done because those four or five senators Wheelan speaks of cooperated. Those senators were all Democrats.

On the issues, I have no apparent disagreements with Wheelan. He’s a brilliant author and public policy expert.

But he, and others, has to drop these silly notions of false equivalence. I too hope for a day when Republicans in Washington are ready to rejoin mainstream political thought. But it does no good to pretend that they exist in that space now. And given the message that GOP voters just sent us from Virginia’s 7th congressional district, they aren’t coming back anytime soon.

Until the GOP is ready to return to rationality, centrists are left with no choice but to organize and vote for Democrats, and work within the Democratic Party to advance centrist goals.

Thomas L. Day is an Iraq War veteran and a Defense Council member of the Truman National Security Project. Views expressed are his own.

Photo: TechCrunch via Flickr

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Where’s The Bread And Butter?

Where’s The Bread And Butter?

WASHINGTON — What if they held an election and nobody talked about how to improve people’s lives?

The 2014 campaign is being waged against a backdrop of national news dominated by everything except the core economic worries of most Americans. Benghazi and Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl have been getting more attention than job opportunities and student borrowing costs. We are said to be a nation focused on the homefront, yet the foreign policy news — from Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan and now, with extraordinary drama, Iraq — has been relentless.

The nature of the public discussion has been a strategic advantage for the GOP. Partly through their own efforts but also because of the flow of events, Republicans have kept President Obama on the defensive and the spotlight off themselves — at least until Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s primary loss threw the Republican Party into chaos. Bread-and-butter concerns are the stuff of Democratic victories because the polls show that most voters still think of the GOP as more protective of the interests of the wealthy than of their own. The less we hear about economics, the better it is for Republicans.

It’s not that the Democrats aren’t trying. Last week, Obama and Senate Democrats touted steps to ease the burdens on the holders of student loans. The president issued an executive order that will give an additional 5 million Americans a chance to cap their student-debt payments at 10 percent of their income. He also endorsed Senator Elizabeth Warren’s bill — it’s part of the Democrats’ “Fair Shot for Everyone” agenda — that would make it easier to refinance debt at lower rates. It would be paid for by closing some tax loopholes.

College access is an important issue. The average tuition at public universities has more than tripled over three decades that saw, as Obama noted, only a 16 percent increase in “the typical family’s income.” The average borrower owes nearly $30,000 by graduation day and Americans now owe “more on student loans than they do on credit cards.”

And at one point, Obama interrupted himself to say: “I don’t know, by the way, why folks aren’t more outraged about this.” How, he asked, can anyone justify allowing “tax loopholes for the very, very fortunate to survive while students are having trouble just getting started in their lives?”

His frustration reflected the way in which Washington gridlock may have a larger cost for Democrats than Republicans — even if Republicans are the ones foiling Democratic proposals such as the student loan bill. Because the Democrats’ stock in trade is to use government to solve voters’ problems, their own supporters become especially disheartened when the legislative process grinds their initiatives to pieces. Obama knows this. “Think about how much more we could do if they were not standing in the way,” he said.

Also curious is how little traction Obama is getting out of the ongoing recovery. When Ronald Reagan ran for re-election in 1984 and his commercials announced it was “Morning Again in America,” the nation’s unemployment rate averaged 7.5 percent over the year. Unemployment stands at 6.3 percent now. And as Bloomberg Businessweek reported, if the pace of job growth “is sustained for the remainder of the year, it would mark the fastest-growing labor market in the U.S. since 1999.”

Why is no one declaring it “Morning in America” now?

Part of the answer lies in how much damage the Great Recession did — the labor force participation rate is at its lowest level since 1978, median income is still below its 1999 peak, and wage growth has been sluggish, though there are signs it’s picking up. Many Democrats worry that touting success could make them look out of touch. But the party’s difficulty in moving the national conversation to economics is also helping to bury promising tidings.

Senate Democrats say that their “Fair Shot” agenda is helping shape the debate in competitive states, despite the national media’s obsessions. The seeds they’re planting now, they argue, will bear fruit in the fall, when it matters. In the meantime, Cantor’s defeat at the hands of the Tea Party will push Republicans to be even less cooperative and more fixated on conservative ideology. Democrats hope that their practical focus will now have even more appeal.

All this translates into a race between Republicans who want the campaign to be about Obama’s shortcomings, real and invented, and Democrats who want it to focus on what they could accomplish in an unobstructed environment. That contest will decide the election.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

AFP Photo/Nicholas Kamm

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