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Heard on the Hill — Roll Call's Gossip Blog North Carolina: Eric Cantor-Affiliated Group Backs Richard Hudson on Radio By Joshua Miller Posted at 5:39 p.m. on May 2 The YG Action Fund, a super PAC affiliated with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), is on the radio in North Carolina’s 8th district with an ad backing former Hill staffer Richard Hudson. The spot, backed by a $53,000 buy, is the second independent expenditure the super PAC has made on behalf of Hudson. On April 24, the group spent $22,750 on mailers supporting the candidate, according to Federal Election Commission...

I reported the other day that the Young Guns Network, a group led by two former top aides to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, is spending $100,000 in the primary between Sen. Richard Lugar and state treasurer Richard Mourdock in a bid to protect the Indiana incumbent - and here's what some of that mail looks like. A lit piece that the YG Network dropped focuses, as they'd said it would, on energy policy - but it is targeted to non-Republicans, as it reminds voters that Indiana's GOP primary is an open one in which Democrats and independents can vote....

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., has defeated fellow Republican Rep. Don Manzullo in the state's 16th District GOP congressional primary. The AP called the race for Kinzinger just after 11 p.m. Eastern time. With 85 percent of precincts reporting, Kinzinger led Manzullo 56 percent to 44 percent. The race between Kinzinger and Manzullo, forced because Illinois lost a congressional seat and state Democrats controlled the redistricting process, followed a common tea party-against-establishment trend in recent GOP primaries. But the script flipped here, with 10-term veteran Manzullo garnering the bulk of the tea party and movement conservative support while Kinzinger, a freshman,...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) endorsed Mitt Romney's presidential bid on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday morning.

Of particular interest is the “Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982,” the largest of Reagan’s tax increases, and generally considered the largest tax increase — as a percentage of the economy — in modern American history. In fact, between 1982 and 1984, Reagan raised taxes four times, and as Bruce Bartlett has explained more than once, Reagan raised taxes 12 times during his eight years in office.

In a strange and unexpected twist, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives is now blocking progress on a bill that would definitively outlaw insider trading [cnbc explains] by federal lawmakers. The Republican sponsor of the bill in the House, Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus of Alabama, had scheduled a markup of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act for next week. But on Wednesday, Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia cancelled the markup session. Cantor reportedly said he blocked the bill to give Congress more time to examine the issue. Critics of the move, however, fear that...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- The FBI says a Tennessee man has been charged with threatening the family of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia. Agents arrested 62-year-old Glendon Swift of Lenoir City on Wednesday. He is accused of leaving two voicemail messages...

Way to go Cantor! That didn't take long! You big Weenie! ...A top Republican in Washington dramatically altered his stance on protesters involved in Occupy Wall Street just one week after comparing the movement to “angry mobs”. Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, told Fox News on Sunday that Republicans agreed there was “too much” income disparity in the country. “More important than my use of the word [‘mobs’] is that there is a growing frustration out there across the country and it is warranted. Too many people are out of work,” he said.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said that President Barack Obama’s $447-billion American Jobs Act was dead, adding that Obama’s “all or nothing” approach would not work. At a Capitol Hill briefing on Monday, a reporter asked Cantor whether the "jobs package as a package [was] dead?" Cantor said, "yes," and shortly thereafter said, “It seems as if the president is in full campaign mode. The president continues to say ‘pass my bill in its entirety.’ As I’ve said from the outset, this all-or-nothing approach is just not acceptable.” Cantor also questioned whether Obama had the votes for his jobs...

Dear Chairman Bernanke, It is our understanding that the Board Members of the Federal Reserve will meet later this week to consider additional monetary stimulus proposals. We write to express our reservations about any such measures. Respectfully, we submit that the board should resist further extraordinary intervention in the U.S. economy, particularly without a clear articulation of the goals of such a policy, direction for success, ample data proving a case for economic action and quantifiable benefits to the American people. It is not clear that the recent round of quantitative easing undertaken by the Federal Reserve has facilitated economic...

Yesterday, it was announced that an astounding 1 in 6 Americans are living in poverty. President Obama's response? To demand a tax on donations to soup kitchens and other charities that help people desperately in need. The President's proposal will impact approximately 40% of all the tax deductible contributions, and essentially penalize soup kitchens, hospitals, and churches that provide essential services to those who need them most. It’s no wonder this tax hike has been rejected on both sides of the aisle.

Eric Cantor (EricCantor) on Twitter

President Obama’s widely anticipated speech before a joint session of Congress on Thursday stunned and amazed his erstwhile political opponents. “Until I heard it from his own lips I never realized how mistaken the GOP plans to tear up all the roads and burn down all the schools were,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va). “And now that I know the President’s jobs plan is endorsed by the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa and the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka, well, let’s just say that my eyes have really been opened.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) admitted that he was skeptical at...

The White House suggested Wednesday that President Obama will not meet with Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor before he delivers his jobs speech to Congress on Thursday night. White House press secretary Jay Carney said he did not have any meetings to announce when asked if Obama would honor the request for consultation made by the Republican leaders. "I do not believe that anyone out there in the country thinks that the answer to getting Washington out of gridlock is having another round, before this speech, of meetings in the Cabinet Room," Carney said.

Rahm Emanuel may have decamped to Chicago, but Democrats in Washington still won't let a good crisis go to waste. Their current gambit is to use Hurricane Irene as a pretext to prevent spending cuts to one of Washington's most notorious boondoggles. This week the left-wing press has been attacking House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for holding disaster relief funding "hostage." A more accurate way to put this is that Senate Democrats won't approve new funding for disasters unless they get the funding they want for corporations that make electric cars.

House Republicans are poised to take on the Obama administration’s “job-destroying regulations” when Congress reconvenes shortly after Labor Day. In a memo to GOP members on Monday morning, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor outlined what he and other Republican leaders consider the “top 10 most harmful” Obama administration regulations. Citing recommendations from committee chairmen, Cantor called for the repeal of those regulations and offered a “selective calendar” timeframe for doing so. “These regulations are reflective of the types of costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business people who want to create jobs,” Cantor wrote to his caucus. [...

Whatever the rhetoric that preceded this week's deal, the debt-ceiling debate was never really about the debt at all. It was about the terms on which the debate would continue. The "two different worldviews" that divide Washington, explains Eric Cantor, are too far apart for anything more than an armistice. The "philosophical starting point" of today's Democrats, as Mr. Cantor sees it, is that they "believe in a welfare state before they believe in capitalism. They promote economic programs of redistribution to close the gap of the disparity between the classes. That's what they're about: redistributive politics." The roots of...

Liberal group Americans United for Change is teaming up with a trio of large unions to air television ads attacking House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and seven potentially vulnerable Republicans for stance on raising the debt ceiling. The targets: Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Reps. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.), Steve King (R-Iowa), Lou Barletta (R-Pa.), Chip Cravaack (R-Minn.), Bobby Schilling (R-Ill.) and Ann Marie Buerkle (R-N.Y.). All are potentially vulnerable members who live in inexpensive media markets. Rehberg is running for Senate. The unions participating in the six-figure ad buy are the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of...

GOP cultists occupy a metaphysical netherworld where basic arithmetic is scorned as an elitist tool. As I write, it's impossible to guess how the latest made-for-TV partisan crisis in Washington will end. We've reached the point where the president of the United States felt he needed to deliver a prime-time speech essentially defending the post-Enlightenment values of reason, evidence and compromise against an obscurantist movement more like a religious cult than a political party. But has President Obama got the guts to deal with the reality facing him? Signs are not encouraging. The standoff has two major components: the adolescent...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Conservative Republicans on Tuesday balked at House leaders' pleas to stop whining and back their plan to slash spending and increase the nation's borrowing ability, throwing into doubt the GOP's proposal to rescue the nation from an unprecedented government default. ... Flanked by conservative colleagues, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told reporters he could not back the Boehner proposal and said it doesn't have the votes to pass. In a two-step plan, Boehner is pressing for a vote on Wednesday and a second vote Thursday on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. "We think there are real problems...

President Obama and congressional leaders negotiated into the evening on Sunday over an elusive deal to lift the nation’s debt limit, increasing the prospect of economic jitters as markets opened in Asia and across the globe without an agreement. -snip- n the conference call, Boehner asked for support. He said compromises were necessary, but he promised to use the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” amendment as a basis for any compromise, according to a source familiar with the call. Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., seen as playing a key role in reining in Boehner from earlier overtures toward a “grand bargain”...

Congressional leadership reacted on Friday after House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio., ended debt limit talks with the White House.House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.:"Tonight, months after we had begun negotiations with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and the Administration, Speaker Boehner and I are ending discussions with the White House and beginning conversations with Senate leaders in the hopes of finding a solution to the debt limit debate in order to avoid default. Throughout the months of discussions, we have worked to identify real spending cuts, binding budget reforms, structural changes to save our entitlement programs, and significant debt reduction....

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) issued the following statement on the debt limit negotiations: "Tonight, months after we had begun negotiations with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and the Administration, Speaker Boehner and I are ending discussions with the White House and beginning conversations with Senate leaders in the hopes of finding a solution to the debt limit debate in order to avoid default. Throughout the months of discussions, we have worked to identify real spending cuts, binding budget reforms, structural changes to save our entitlement programs, and significant debt reduction. Unfortunately, time and again...

The year is 2012 and the United States has just elected Eric Cantor (R) as the first Jewish president of the United States. Eric calls up his mother a few weeks after election day and says, 'So, Mom, I assume you will be coming to my inauguration?' 'I don't think so. It's a ten hour drive, your father isn't as young as he used to be, and my arthritis is acting up again.' 'Don't worry about it Mom, I'll send Air Force One to pick you up and take you home. And a limousine will pick you up at your...

John Boehner and the Republican caucus in the House passed the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act as promised on a near-party-line vote tonight, 234-190. The move puts the onus back on the White House to propose an alternative or assume responsibility for killing the debt-ceiling hike it contains: Defying a veto threat, the Republican-controlled House passed legislation Tuesday night to slice federal spending by $6 trillion and require a constitutional balanced budget amendment to be sent to the states in exchange for averting a threatened government default.The 234-190 vote marked the power of deeply conservative first-term Republicans, and stood in...

House Republican leaders have missed a 36-hour deadline President Obama set during a Thursday meeting for lawmakers to give him a plan to avert a national default. The deadline came and went Saturday morning without a response from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). Instead, Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) plan to move the Cut, Cap and Balance Act on the floor next week, which would require passage of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution before the debt limit is raised. A House GOP leadership aide said at noontime Saturday that Boehner and Cantor did not send...

While Barack Obama went to the press for the third time in 17 days, John Boehner and Eric Cantor called his bluff in the House. The Republican leadership announced that the House would vote on a plan to raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion and matching cuts:

"We want to change the system here," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told a news conference on Friday. "We want to be able to go home to the people who elected us and show them that we're not going to allow this kind of spending to continue. We don't have the money -- they don't have the money." Cantor said Republicans will bring up a bill next week -- the "Cut, Cap and Balance" bill -- "So that we can demonstrate that we are getting things under control and that the people who put us here can gain some...

RUSH: The Republicans remain very nervous, ladies and gentlemen. These idiots at Moody's, or as Stuart Varney says, "Moodis," the rating service clearly joining with the Democrats to put pressure on the House Republicans, the Senate Republicans as well by claiming if we don't raise the debt limit then all is lost, the US reputation gone forever. So the pressure mounts on the Republicans in the House, and so far they're standing firm. I think Obama's cracking, folks, I think he's cracking up. The way I interpret this, this guy's had the road paved for him from the get-go, he's...

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has become both a key player and big pain to more seasoned negotiators in the White House talks over how to keep the government paying its bills after next month. "Eric, don't call my bluff," President Barack Obama warned late Wednesday after a dramatic back-and-forth with the Virginia Republican that made some in Cantor's party wince. "Enough is enough." Not for Cantor, second-in-command to Speaker John Boehner who is widely assumed to aspire to the House's top job. The testy exchange with Obama left Washington bubbling with speculation about whether the self-styled...

Last night, President Obama and Eric Cantor exchanged harsh words over the debt ceiling, and on the Senate floor just now, Harry Reid uncorked a harsh attack on Cantor that suggests Dems are embarking on a new strategy: Isolating Cantor as the new public face of GOP intransigence.

The wounded are especially dangerous fighters. President Obama now occupies the high ground in the debt-ceiling debate, having called the Republicans’ bluff on the debt. He showed that deficit reduction is not now, and never has been, the GOP’s priority. He dare not get overconfident.After thwarting the deal that House Speaker John Boehner was cooking up with Obama, Rep. Eric Cantor, the majority leader and Boehner’s rival, needs to show he knew what he was doing and recoup political ground. Cantor is likely to present Obama with spending cuts that the president once seemed to endorse as part of a...

Barack Obama is today preparing to re-enter talks with Republicans as the two sides battle to reach an agreement in the ongoing debt ceiling crisis. Fuming lawmakers pointed fingers at one another and Obama on Thursday as negotiations over raising the national debt limit entered a perilous endgame. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned of economic damage, and an anxious Wall Street envisioned catastrophe if the U.S. defaulted on its obligations. In the build up to today's meeting, Moody's ratings agency yesterday said that the U.S. could lose its top credit rating in coming weeks if a stand-off between the...

Republicans think they have an easy message to sell to voters: Slash the size of government and stop tax increases. But a sideshow has percolated on Capitol Hill: There are too many Republican messengers with too many messages — often undercutting one another — as the nation teeters on the brink of financial default. It’s a problem for a party searching for a national figure who can go toe to toe politically with Barack Obama. (snip)

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says he didn't mean any disrespect to President Barack Obama during a heated exchange that ended with the president cutting off a White House meeting.

I've been bracing for a tear in the space time continuum that comes when any liberal accuses anyone of being childish, like Harry Reid has done with Eric Cantor. I guess I'm relying on the same science that proves the globe's thermostat is out of control.Part of me wants to defer to Reid on this since he has so much experience being childish himself.....like when he equated opponents of ObamaCare to antebellum slave owners, or when he said Obama could easily flip the switch on which accent?To make matters worse, he was piling on top of what Chuck Schumer,...

The latest meeting between President Barack Obama and lawmakers regarding the nation's debt ended without any progress on a deal and a new level of animosity between those involved. According to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia), "The president told me, ‘Eric, don’t call my bluff. You know I’m going to take this to the American people. He then walked out." Evidently the president believes with a few more 'yes we cans' and 'eat our peas' from him, we will support a deal that serves his own political agenda but does a huge disservice to the country.

[VIDEO AT SITE] The president told Eric Cantor "Don't Call My Bluff". Well, why wouldn't you call someone's bluff; especially, after they just told you they were bluffing. The president has once again made a mockery of the IQ that is supposed to be off the charts, during the negotiations over raising the $14.3 trillion debt limit. His tough guy line that sounds more like a Pee Wee Herman character than Gary Cooper; he was obviously off teleprompter. The perviously unknown term "off teleprompter" has become that legendary period of time, when the real wit and wisdom of Obama shines...

House Speaker John Boehner has told the White House that he doesn't want to go to Camp David to negotiate on the deficit. "The Speaker has told the White House he sees no need to go to Camp David this weekend," Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said in an email.

President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of a stormy debt-limit meeting with congressional leaders Wednesday, a dramatic setback to the already shaky negotiations. “He shoved back and said ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’ and walked out,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told reporters in the Capitol after the meeting. On a day when the Moody’s rating agency warned that American debt could be downgraded, the White House talks blew up amid a new round of sniping between Obama and Cantor, who are fast becoming bitter enemies. When Cantor said the two sides were too far apart to get a deal...

<p>Reid says Cantor's conduct during the sensitive White House talks have shown, in Reid's words, "he shouldn't even be at the table." Reid says other congressional leaders are negotiating in good faith as an Aug. 2 deadline approaches for raising the debt limit.</p>

Rep Allen West (R-Fla): "Real leaders don't make threats" In increasingly acrimonious budget talks, President Obama is still attempting to play hardball with the GOP's large congressional majority while proposing smoke-and-mirrors deferred "cuts" that bite far after the 2012 election cycle has run its course. But even this illusion of restraint is only being offered so as to ensure that he gets his money-grubbing paws on as much of your grandkids' dinero as possible, pronto- and everybody and his dog knows it. After hectoring, demagoguery, and threats didn't impress anybody over the last four days, Obama slipped into a childish...

U.S. President Barack Obama clashed with Republican lawmakers on Wednesday in a fierce White House meeting on deficit reduction that left a deal in question as the clock ticked toward a debt default. "Enough's enough," Obama said, according to a Democratic official familiar with the talks. The meeting came as Moody's Investors Service jolted Washington with a stark warning that the United States may lose its top credit rating in the coming weeks if the $14.3 trillion limit on America's borrowing was not raised. The warning sent the U.S. dollar tumbling against most major currencies. Stock futures and debt prices...

Officials familiar with the negotiations say today’s meeting began with President Obama asking House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to lay out what was agreed upon in the deficit reduction talks led by Vice President Biden. Cantor outlined around $2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade: $1–1.1 trillion in discretionary spending; $200 billion in mandatory discretionary spending (such as civilian military retirement and farm subsidies); $200 billion in Medicare and Medicaid; and roughly $200-300 billion in saved interest on the debt. After Cantor’s presentation, the President said the two sides might be able to reach consensus on roughly...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top Republican floated a tax compromise on Wednesday that could revive hopes for a budget deal as President Barack Obama warned the United States could spiral back into recession if an agreement is not reached soon. Rep Eric Cantor, the No. 2 official in the Republican-led House of Representatives, said that his party could agree to close some tax breaks in a trillion-dollar budget deal as long as they were offset with tax cuts elsewhere. "Any discussion about loopholes must be accompanied by offsetting tax cuts," Cantor said at a news conference one day before he...

A top House Republican leader suggested a way to end a stalemate over taxes in the debt-ceiling negotiations, saying Wednesday that Republicans could endorse ending some business tax breaks targeted by Democrats if they also agreed to renew other business-backed tax benefits. The proposal by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.), which was described in a briefing with reporters, represents a new wrinkle in the ongoing budget discussions. In recent weeks, Democrats have pushed for raising revenue by closing a raft of corporate tax breaks and benefits as part of a potential deficit-reduction deal that would ease the passage...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top Republican said on Wednesday his party could compromise on taxes as part of a broad budget deal as President Barack Obama warned the United States could spiral back into recession if Congress does not act soon. Ahead of a Thursday meeting with Obama, House of Representatives Republican Leader Eric Cantor indicated that Republicans could break an impasse over taxes that has held up a deal to avert an early August default. "If the president wants to talk loopholes, we'll be glad to talk loopholes," Cantor said at a news conference. "Any type of discussion should...

Cantor Pulls Out of Biden-Led Budget By JANET HOOK And COREY BOLES WASHINGTON—House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Thursday said he was pulling out of the bipartisan budget talks headed by Vice President Joe Biden for now because the group has reached an impasse over taxes that only President Barack Obama and Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) could resolve. Mr. Cantor, in an interview after a negotiating session he described as bitterly contentious, said he would not be attending today's scheduled meeting of the bipartisan deficit-reduction leadership group because he believed it was time for the negotiations to move to a...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor called Thursday morning for colleague Anthony Weiner to “come clean” and give a clear explanation of how a photo of a man’s crotch ended up being sent to a young woman in Seattle through his Twitter account. “There’s a lot of explaining going on without a lot of clarity,” said Cantor, a Virginia Republican, in response to a question on “Fox and Friends.” While other House colleagues of Weiner have resisted saying whether they think Weiner took or sent the photo, Cantor’s comments suggested that Weiner was, somehow, involved. “The American people are right in...

One of the most interesting facets of modern economic policy is the sheer number of numbers. There is the unemployment rate. There is the workforce participation rate. There is the debt level. There is the deficit number. There is the foreclosure rate. There is the economic confidence number. There is the interest rate, and the inflation rate, and the money-supply rate. The point is that we Americans are far too busy (and perhaps economically confused) to look at multiple numbers in order to figure out if we can afford a vacation to Disney World. In 2012 we should strongly encourage...