Eric Cantor

Washington Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers was elected by the House Republican conference as its chair for the upcoming Congress, reports Jill Jackson of CBS News. McMorris Rodgers, who defeated Georgia congressman Tom Price for the position, will rank fourth in the House leadership. Price had significant support from House conservatives like Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Jeb Hensarling of Texas, but McMorris Rodgers was understood to be the favorite of most of the Republican leadership team.

When it comes to finding a leadership role in the next Congress, Tom Price is running out of options. Price, a stalwart conservative House member from Georgia, is the outgoing Republican Policy Committee chairman, which ranked him fifth in the GOP House leadership.

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, recently said that Republican Jews are "being exploited." Today, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Republican, responds: 

Richmond, Virginia
On Tuesday, George Allen, the former governor of Virginia, won the Republican nomination to run for the U.S. Senate seat he once held. Allen won 65 percent of the vote, running far ahead of his closest challenger, Tea Party activist Jamie Radtke. Calling himself the "common sense conservative nominee of the Republican party," Allen spoke to a small crowd of supporters at the Westin hotel in Richmond's West End.

The Eric Cantor-affiliated Young Guns Network has recently jumped into the Indiana Senate primary on behalf of Dick Lugar, paying for mailers that criticize Lugar's opponent, Richard Mourdock, for wanting to cut federal education funding. Politico's Jonathan Martin reports why this could backfire--on House Republicans:

Politico reports that the Young Guns Network, "a group affiliated with two former aides to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor," just spent $104,628.00 to support six-term incumbent senator Richard Lugar in his primary battle to hold his seat against state treasurer Richard Mourdock. The money, according to disclosures, went to "mailers" in favor of the 80-year-old Lugar, who now looks likely to lose to his more conservative challenger.

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The Hill: "Cantor aides deny new PAC is about VP run"

Earlier this evening, the House of Representatives voted against a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government past September 30. Forty-eight Republicans broke with their party's leadership and joined 182 Democrats in opposition of the bill. Reuters reports:

A host of liberal politicians and pundits have taken House Republican leader Eric Cantor to task for daring to insist that any disaster spending allocated to pay for the damage done by Hurricane Irene be offset in the budget elsewhere. They view Cantor as injecting politics into the country’s disaster management programs.

According to the Budget Control Act, the 12-member Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, or the so-called supercommittee, must be formed within 14 days of the bill becoming law. Since President Obama just signed the law, Congress has until August 16, two weeks from today, to fill the slots. The next question Democrats and Republicans will need to answer is, which of their members will they select for the supercommittee? 

I understand the debt ceiling deal is probably going to pass. I’m not even comfortable unequivocally urging members to vote against it, given all the real loyalties and future relationships and competing responsibilities actual members have to deal with. And I’m not sure I’d urge anyone to vote against it if he were the 51st or 218th vote, because I don’t know that one could adequately manage, either in the real world or the political one, the consequences of “default.”

Soon after Mitch McConnell joined the debt limit talks, his suspicions grew. An agreement with President Obama on raising the limit by $2.4 trillion​—​and tied to serious spending cuts​—​looked impossible. The more he heard from Obama and his aides in the private sessions at the White House, the more he felt that no good could come from the talks. They would lead to a bad deal, harm to Republicans, or both.