News Release

Is Cantor’s Loss Part of a Transpartisan Movement?

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While most analysts in major media are interpreting House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s loss as a victory for the far right, frequently focusing only on immigration, some analysts point to evidence that it’s part of a bottom-up anti-establishement current:

ZAID JILANI, Areo64 at gmail.com, @ZaidJilani
Jilani is formerly with Think Progress, United Republic and Bold Progressives. He’s now a graduate student at Syracuse University. He said today: “Brat campaigned explicitly on jailing bankers and on Cantor’s backing of the STOCK Act. His election was a rejection of political corruption.” Jilani cited campaign speeches by Brat, like this video, where he discusses the STOCK Act [at 18:00] — Brat states the STOCK Act would have stopped “insider trading by congressional members and their families … one congressman [Cantor] stopped it and changed the language.”

SHAHID BUTTAR, media at bordc.org, @bordc
Executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Buttar said today: “For too long, politicians in Washington have blithely ignored their constitutional duties while deferring to executive agencies engaged in a frontal assault on the individual rights guaranteed by our nation’s founders. Eric Cantor’s primary loss to a relatively unknown candidate reflects, at least in part, a transpartisan grassroots rejection of the NSA spying programs that Cantor has staunchly defended. Given his role in the Republican leadership, he was responsible in part for the behind the scenes, closed-door process that recently gutted the USA FREEDOM Act, and he has long been part of the culture of congressional corruption that continued to defer to executive agencies despite their long-standing and ongoing crimes against the American people. …

“Republicans are not the only ones who should take heed: plenty of Democrats are complicit in the crimes of U.S. intelligence agencies, and will risk similar upsets until they start demonstrating independence from the executive branch they are charged to oversee, check, and balance.”

See “Eric Cantor’s loss is bad news for the NSA,” which quotes Brat: “The NSA’s indiscriminate collection of data on all Americans is a disturbing violation of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy.”