Cantor: ‘Not a Game’ The debt-limit negotiations are stalling over the fact that one side wants to get it right, the other side wants business as usual.
A couple of hours before Thursday’s debt-limit negotiations, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor huddles with aides and reviews budget numbers. Across the rotunda, one of his fellow White House conferees, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, chastises Cantor for allegedly acting “childish” during Wednesday’s meeting.
Cantor, sitting across from me in his Capitol office, a bowl of untouched M&Ms at his side, shrugs at the slight and the many others that have been slung his way. He tells me that those who resort to name-calling, or cast him as intransigent, have knowingly misrepresented his actions.
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“This is not a game,” Cantor says. “We have serious problems. We have put out very thoughtful proposals to try to address them. But sometimes, around here, that doesn’t always make it through.”
For months, Cantor has been a force in high-stakes talks, from the debt-reduction discussions led by Vice President Biden to the current Cabinet Room confabs hosted by President Obama. On Wednesday night, the ongoing efforts, he says, unfortunately veered into the personal when the president criticized the Virginia lawmaker for opposing tax increases.
The president “got very agitated,” Cantor told reporters Wednesday night at the Capitol. Cantor added that Obama then told him not to “call my bluff,” and said that he would take his argument to the “American people.”
Reflecting on the episode Thursday afternoon, Cantor chuckles over how dramatically the president behaved. He chalks up the heated conversation to politics more than anything. “They’re just not serious,” he says. “Even those things identified in the Biden talks have been cast aside, only touchable if we raise taxes.”
“I was willing to compromise,” Cantor contends. “I said, Mr. President, we want to do it right. I said, I agree with you, we ought not to go beyond August 2. But because the votes are not there in the House, I asked whether he was willing to come off his statement that he will veto that. That’s what led to the blowup.”
The impasse, he predicts, will continue, unless President Obama can agree to work with Republicans on a short-term extension coupled with significant spending cuts. “It is certainly at a point of frustration right now, but we are not giving up hope,” he says. One of the points he keeps making to the president, he says, is that Republicans have already shown that they will share the sacrifice, pointing to the House GOP budget, which tackles entitlement reform, as his main example. Democrats, he says, are the ones who need to show a similar commitment to fiscal discipline.
Still, Cantor wonders whether Obama already has, in essence, shut down the opportunity for a cuts-laden compromise. “I really do question when I’m sitting in the room, hearing the president say that we must not have any movement unless it takes us through the election,” he says. “That, to me, seems very political. I’d like to get it right, rather than just do something.”
Nine weeks ago, House Speaker John Boehner enlisted Cantor for the Biden group. Cantor, who last month got frustrated and left the sessions, tells me that he thought Biden was smart in how he moderated the closed-door discussions. It was only when Democratic leaders began to complain about the cuts being proposed that he began to lose faith in the White House’s commitment to solving the problem with Republicans.
“I’ve given the vice president credit and will continue to give him a lot of credit,” Cantor says. “He was able to keep apart philosophical differences and focus on how we can reduce spending. But after about six weeks, he began to hear marching orders from the other side of this building. They began to sound the alarm that the cuts had gone too far.”
Leftists will go to any lengths to cover for the flaming, unmitigated disaster that is Barack Hussein Obama. The Alinsky tactics are getting a little tiresome at this point. Maybe it's time for some updated "Schumer's Rules For Radicals?"
erratum.
The national anthem is based on the English Beer drinking tune "to anacreon and back". God Bless America is based on "God Save the King (Queen)".
U.S. Grant was so tone deaf he said he only knew two songs: One was Yankee Doodle and the other one wasn't"
Yes, indeed - Hang in there. I'm pleased with the R's steadiness thus far. Could we be approaching a change in the culture for Washington in which cutting spending will be more respectable than increasing it? We desperately need such change.
Not really interested in how the politburo interpret this or that silly argument. Not interested in how they feel about it.
The second last paragraph, however, is very telling. "On a quest to seek a plausible excuse" comes to my mind when reading the lines.
The GOP elites in the Congress are not willing to stand their ground. They will cave, compromise their principle, and accept any deal that would not make them look responsible for the potential default instead of making their case clearly, loudly, and relentlessly to the American people.
What they don't understand is that every time they compromise on a principle issue, or an issue they ran on, they a) turn the people who gave them the vote to cynics--doesn't really matter who you vote for or if you even do, they will cook up whatever they like anyway--and b) steadily lowering any future voter turnout--why to bother, they ain't listening...
Stay with it, Mr Cantor. You are fighting for American survival while Obama fights for American collapse. This is too serious to dismiss as politics-as-usual.
The problem is the Repubs have lost the PR campaign. It's so easy to win...but they haven't made the argument. First rule for the Repubs should be to discredit the media and show the Democrat proposals and statements for the un-truth's they are. It shouldn't be hard...but once again...the GOP has fumbled. There should never have been a let up of campaign mode after the elections. Every dime should have been spent defining Obama and the Democrats for what they are. Instead, we get months of negotiations behind closed doors...which allow Obama and the Democrats time to get away from the truth that was shown during the campaign last year. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
This is more than "not a game", it is a false crisis. But for the President's late coming refusal for anything but a "big deal", the debt limit could be raised. The irony is that the President has sat on his hands for months, proposed a completely polar opposite budget in January, and until just a few weeks ago wanted a "clean" debt limit increase that would last until after the election.
Obama's intransigence has created a false deadline of August 2.
Harry Reid "chastises Cantor for allegedly acting 'childish' during Wednesday’s meeting."
How stunning. The man who heads the tribunal that has gone over 800 days without passing a budget, or even putting anything on paper to outline how they'd manage our tax revenues, wants to call someone else "childish".
It's SO, you know, ADULT-like to be derelict in one's duties for over 800 days.
The Repubs cannot win the PR battle. The mainstream media will not give them the microphone. Even Fox News has been negligent in covering them while covering every word Obama says.
There are a couple of times Cantor has aggravated me over the years, but he has made me proud many more times. I have never seen any indications that he and Boehner don't get along.
This statement may bother some, but I feel part of the reason the Dems attack Cantor is because he is Jewish and they think they have the Jewish franchise just as they think they have the black franchise and female franchise.
You make a great point, Fran. They hate Cantor and demonize him for the same reason they demonized Clarence Thomas and, more recently, Sarah Palin--how DARE a black, a woman, or a Jew be Conservative!
Here's the saving grace, however: The electorate will leave them anyhow, and in all three groups.
Whether it is women who see how cavalier about denigration of Republican women like Bachmann and Palin and how intrusive on maternal rights they are deciding to vote how they feel, or whether it is Jews who not only understand how fiscally bankrupt Democrats are and how much they've hurt everyone's nest egg but also, of course, see the anti-Israel bias in Obama's foreign policy, OR, and I sincerely believe this, blacks who have suffered the most economically and seen virtually no gains in other areas who may tell pollsters they're still behind the candidate they voted for due to historic factors and solidarity obligations but who, in the privacy of the voting booth, will vote their kids' futures just like we all do....
My prediction? The more Dems demonize Women, Blacks, and Jews who happen to be Conservative, the fewer votes they will garner from ALL voters in those traditionally Democrat-voting groups, regardless of their left/right political points of view.
When you take people for granted and abuse them with the same hate-filled images and language of bygone prejudice, you both get and deserve their rejection.
Obama is a Chicago politician and in that town politics is a game that is won by those who play it best. There is no other explanation for voter-drones who have been eaten up and spit out by Democrats for decades, who exist in poverty and misery despite the promises of a better life, but still they march in lock-step to the polls and pull the "D" lever.
It doesn't occur to Chicagoans that there are other ideas worth trying and perhaps it would be to their benefit to give someone else a chance to do better. They are so dependent on the Democratic machine that they can't think for themselves any more, so they just do as they've always done and hope things will improve some day. Obama believes all American voters are like Chicago voters and "if he builds it, they will come."
Most of the Republicans in Illinois are either in cahoots with the corrupt Dems, or completely incompetent at articulating a message, or prefer to put more energy into feuding with other Repubs than anything else. The ones with ideas, smarts and ability to communicate are on local conservative talk radio, not running for office.
The rest of the media won't tell it like it is--even the ones that claim to be on the side of the people let themselves be muzzled by Richie and Rahm, even to shutting down their own comment boards when things get too real. The newspaper reporters are so hopelessly biased that the only reason to read their political stories is to analyze them for water-carrying spin. The only place you can find out or discuss the truth is on a blog run by an anonymous Chicago cop. The police know what's what and are disgusted by the liberals who have sent the city down the tubes.
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