Breitbart’s wall-to-wall coverage of the primary race in its final days was not coincidental. The right-wing website had pummeled the Gang of Eight proposal throughout 2013, seemingly hell-bent on dashing Marco Rubio’s future presidential prospects. Now another handmaiden of the elite had strayed into the crosshairs, and Breitbart’s executive chairman, a native Virginian named Steve Bannon, was insistent on his reporters flooding the zone with bruising coverage of Cantor during the primary’s home stretch.
Breitbart wasn’t alone in hammering Cantor. Two of conservative talk radio’s finest flamethrowers, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham, used the majority leader as a political piñata throughout 2014. Ingraham was particularly harsh, even paying a visit to the district to headline a Brat rally less than a week before the primary.
“We are slowly losing our country,” she told an overflow crowd, according to one of several stories published by a Breitbart reporter on the scene. “Who do you think Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi want to win this primary? They want Eric Cantor to win because Eric Cantor is an ally in the biggest fight that will occur in the next six months in Washington . . . and that is the fight over immigration amnesty.”5
When Brat took the stage, he added, “A vote for Eric Cantor is a vote for open borders. A vote for Eric Cantor is a vote for amnesty. If your neighbor votes for Eric Cantor, they’re voting for amnesty.”
Cantor’s allies were rattled but hardly resigned. The campaign’s pollster, John McLaughlin, had conducted a survey in late May showing Cantor leading Brat by 34 points. The noise on the ground, and on conservative talk radio, and in the right-wing corners of the internet, was just that—noise. Cantor couldn’t lose. Not to Dave Brat. So confident was the majority leader’s team that on the morning of the election, rather than pounding the pavement in search of every last vote, Cantor was speaking at a fund-raiser in Washington—on behalf of a colleague.
It was symbolic of how the majority leader had prioritized his career. Staffers would later think back to a decade’s worth of postponed or canceled meetings with constituents, almost always due to fund-raisers or lobbyist receptions or member-driven events. Cantor was a master of the inside game, collecting chits and building the brand he would need to secure the most powerful office in Congress. But it came at a price. As the returns came in on June 10, it was evident that residents of Virginia’s Seventh District assigned greater importance to the title of representative than that of Speaker of the House.
For the biggest political upset modern Washington had ever seen, the results were anticlimactic. Brat won the primary by 11 points, beating Cantor even in his own home county. The victory was so lopsided that the majority leader’s complaint of Democrats crossing over to defeat him, which turnout patterns showed had contributed to his demise, fell on deaf ears. Cantor didn’t just lose; he got destroyed. And so, too, did the prospects for immigration reform.
“I don’t think the split in the Republican Party is going to be made up with new Latino voters or new black voters or new Asian voters,” Ingraham said on Fox News that night, savoring her victory lap. “In fact, I think somebody who runs on immigration reform—or amnesty or whatever you want to call it—in 2016 would probably do worse than Mitt Romney did in 2012.”
THE SPEAKER’S CELL PHONE BUZZED. HIS CHIEF OF STAFF WAS CALLING, and Boehner, midway through a meal at Trattoria Alberto, his favorite Capitol Hill ristorante, nearly didn’t answer. When he did, the news practically knocked him off his chair: Cantor had lost. “I was pissed,” Boehner says. “Because in my mind, I was done.”
In a private memo written in November 2013, titled “The End,” Boehner’s top staffers had presented him with three choices for retirement. Option one meant announcing in January 2014 his plan to leave at year’s end. Option two meant announcing that plan in August. Option three meant announcing it in November, after the midterm elections. Boehner had ruled out option one, refusing to make himself a yearlong lame duck and invite further discord inside the House GOP. But he had never decided between options two and three. And now, with his replacement sidelined, it was not clear he could choose either.
Boehner hung up and dialed Ryan. Explaining that he had long planned to retire after 2014, and that Kevin McCarthy, the third-ranking House Republican, was nowhere near ready to become Speaker, he asked Ryan to replace Cantor as majority leader, effective immediately, and slide into the speakership in 2015.
“You’ve got to do this job,” Boehner told him.
“There’s no way I’m doing this job,” Ryan replied. “You’ve got to stay.’”
Boehner dragged on a Camel Light and cursed Cantor’s name into the summer night’s air. For all the chariness between them early on, the Speaker and the majority leader had developed a solid working relationship and a level of trust that could be understood only inside the leadership’s foxhole. Boehner was well prepared for Cantor to take over, confident that he was leaving the party—and more important, the institution—in capable hands. So much for that.
Then the Speaker received a call from an old tutor, Newt Gingrich.
“Hey, Boehner, try this on for size,” Gingrich said. “What do you think happens if Cantor doesn’t spend a dime on that race, doesn’t mention his opponent’s name once, just ignores him completely and pretends there’s no primary at all?”
“I think he wins by forty points,” Boehner replied. “That was the worst campaign ever run.”
But the Speaker couldn’t afford to dwell on the disappointment of Cantor’s improbable defeat. The forces that had crushed his heir apparent threatened to swallow up Washington itself. Congress was consumed that summer by the issue of—what else?—illegal immigration, with a crisis unfolding at the southern border. In fiscal year 2014, a total of 68,541 unaccompanied children had been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, a 77 percent increase over the previous year, according to Vox.6 Conservatives accused Obama of providing a magnet for the illegal minors with his executive actions to provide amnesty; the White House blamed Republicans for railroading a bipartisan bill that would have secured the border.
If it wasn’t obvious after the summer of 2013, it was after Cantor’s loss: Immigration reform was dead. Sean Hannity had been right. It was a career killer.
A LEADERSHIP SHUFFLE IN THE REPUBLICAN RANKS THREATENED TO expose the intraparty schisms anew. Cantor announced that he would be leaving Congress early, resigning both his seat and his position below Boehner. That meant a special election to name a new majority leader and, if McCarthy succeeded in moving up, another special election to replace him.
McCarthy was a curious figure. Universally viewed as a pitiful whip, someone with neither the legislative guile nor the meat-grinder maliciousness required to steer the membership, he was also generally well liked, an easygoing Californian who was more a buddy than a boss. McCarthy also benefited from the same unspoken realization that buoyed Boehner and Cantor: The GOP leadership had been dealt an exceptionally tough hand after the 2010 election, charged with supervising a rowdy bunch of revolutionaries who refused to play by the customary rules.
One of those revolutionaries, Raúl Labrador, took exception to McCarthy’s likely promotion. “What I found most objectionable was not Kevin, but the process: You’re next in line and you get to move up without even being challenged,” Labrador says. “It was everything that’s wrong with Congress.”