House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s top communications aide resigned from the Virginia Republican’s congressional office this past weekend in a cloud of controversy after he got in a fight with another staffer. They were arguing over Cantor’s failure to get bipartisan support for a bill that he said would cause job improvement, and things got physical. (Cantor, of course, was the leader of the Republican attempt to drag the debt ceiling negotiations to the brink this past summer, and has pioneered a brass-knuckle style of rapid-response partisanship that mainly focuses on stopping Obama’s agenda.)
The fighting aide, Brad Dayspring, was sentenced to leave his boss and serve his time in pleasant exile — he immediately signed up with the Young Guns Action Fund Super PAC, an outside political organization that cannot coordinate with Cantor’s office but can take unlimited donations. The group was started by another former top Cantor advisor — and Young Guns was the title of a political book that Cantor co-authored with fellow Republican House members Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Paul Ryan.
Super PACs are not just changing the face of campaign finance and enabling big money to swarm politics at an unprecedented rate. They are also keeping the peace!
