Word: cantor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Congress returns from its midwinter break and Obama readies his first joint address to Congress, Cantor and the rest of his party are grappling with how to approach the rest of the President's agenda this year - housing and foreclosures, financial markets re-regulation, the budget, universal health care and green jobs. The key in opposing the stimulus, Cantor says, was offering a credible alternative. "Our members in the House really rallied around a forward-looking, smarter, simpler stimulus plan," Cantor says. "We took a very positive, constructive view on where the stimulus should be, and when the bill that...
Toward that end, Cantor - the No. 2 House Republican behind minority leader John Boehner - has been busy of late. The party's chief vote counter whipped his colleagues into united opposition of President Barack Obama's stimulus plan. Taking on the relatively unpopular congressional Democrats is one thing, but flagrantly opposing a wildly popular new President is risky, especially when any payoff could take years. But the move energized the GOP for the first time in a long while, inspiring six Republican governors - all rumored 2012 wannabes like Cantor himself - to threaten to decline some of the stimulus money. (Read...
...opposition heightened Cantor's profile as the Newt Gingrich of his generation, a wonky, partisan bomb thrower who can rake in well over $300,000 in a single fundraiser, as he did last week. The Richmond, Va., Republican, who likes to remind folks that he holds James Madison's seat in Congress, is one of the few rising stars in a party struggling to reinvent itself. But at 45, the baby-faced Cantor is hardly new to the scene. A player in House leadership for seven years, he has raised more than $16.5 million for himself and his colleagues...
...Cantor believes the one lesson the Obama Administration took from his orchestrated opposition was that it must work harder to reach out to the GOP. Many Democrats argue the opposite, saying the stimulus fight proved the futility of the new President's attempts to achieve a measure of bipartisan consensus. Stripping some objectionable measures (like family-planning aid for states and money for cleaning up the National Mall) from early versions of the House plan, they point out, won over absolutely no House Republicans...
...Cantor bristles when asked about taking an opposing position from business interests on the stimulus plan. "I knew about the endorsements from some of the business groups for sure, but their obligation is not to the voters and the people of this country like mine is," he says. "I feel that my obligation is to be a prudent guardian of taxpayer money...