The Tea Party Forces the Fall of the Number Two Republican

Rumors of the death of the tea party, as Mark Twain said of his own, were exaggerated. The populist conservative movement that had its heyday in the early years of Democratic President Barack Obama was in a slump. It had forced the GOP to the right, but its candidates lost their clout against the establishment — until now.

The victory of David Brat, an unknown economics professor with little political experience, against Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, puts the tea party back into the center of the debate. Tuesday’s primary election in the 7th district of Virginia decapitated the right in the U.S., aggravated the gap between moderate Republicans and the populists and threw the party into a crisis of leadership.

“I’m a little tired of how, after winning an election, we are told that we are strong, and when we lose an election they say we are destroyed. We will not go away,” Adam Brandon, executive vice president of Freedom Works, a major tea party organization, warned yesterday in a telephone interview. “The movement is alive and will remain so. If the Republican Party wants to survive, it must commit to the principles of the minimal state,”* he added, in reference to the tea party’s opposition to state intervention.

There is no precedent for a majority leader in the House of Representatives — for practical purposes, the number two Republican in Washington — to lose a primary. Cantor had been re-elected seven times. He aspired to the office of Speaker, or president, of the House, the office which Republican John Boehner occupies. In all budget fights with the Obama administration, Cantor defended the most conservative positions. He was also one of the architects, three years ago, of the launch of the tea party in the Capitol. Now the movement he fed is devouring him.

By losing in the primary to Brat, and unless he resorts to the improbable system where his followers write his name on the ballot in the November election, Cantor is excluded from the battle for the seat he held since 2001. In the permanent guerrilla war that the tea party has deployed against the Republican apparatus, Cantor is the biggest piece it has claimed.

65,000 people voted in the Virginia primary. The reasons for the results are complex and vary from immigration reform — Brat raised the hardcore flag in front of the lukewarm Cantor — to resentment in America of Washington elites. The New York Times noted yesterday another disturbing factor: Cantor was the only Jewish Republican in Congress.

The move to the right in the House of Representatives makes Obama’s initiatives even more difficult. What is indisputable is the effect of these primaries in Washington. For the Republican Party it represents a jolt. On Wednesday afternoon, Cantor announced his resignation. On July 31, he will leave the post of leader of the Republican majority in the House. The plans of the right, four and a half months before legislative elections that looked unfavorable for Obama’s Democrats, are disrupted.

If the lesson that Republicans take from the humiliation of the Virginia congressman is that the party must lean even further to the right, this can be cause for celebration for the Democratic Party, habitually more to the center. Every step the Republican Party takes to the right leaves more space for the Democrats to win.

The problem for Obama is that a more right-leaning GOP will make it harder for Congress to pass any legislative initiative. Paralysis, evident since 2011 brought the tea party to Congress, will be accentuated in the two and a half years he has left in the White House.

Thomas Mann, a member of the Brookings Institution think tank, is pessimistic. “Immigration reform seems to me to have no future in the House of Representatives. This puts the final nail in the coffin,” he says in an email. “The Republican Party has become a conservative party of the hard line, and many of its members are radical nihilists,”* added Mann, co-author of “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” a reference essay on polarization in Congress.

The tea party, born in 2009 as a confederation of heterogeneous activists united by the rejection of the investment policies of Obama and his health care reform, will have had two terms. Brat’s success is partly explained by his campaign against the regularization of undocumented immigrants, but also by diffuse irritation in the U.S. against Washington and what it represents: disconnect between elites and citizens, influence of lobbies and political paralysis.

During the campaign, Cantor — close to big business, the world of big companies and Wall Street — spent $168,637 in steakhouse meals alone. Brat spent $200,000 in his entire campaign. The tea party returns. It never left.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.