Politics & Power Quote by Eric Cantor

"The American people elected us here to cut spending so we can create an environment for jobs in America. The House has acted. We have demonstrated that we want to see spending, discretionary spending, brought down to levels of 2008. We've seen no counteraction. We have seen no position that has been expressed by the other side at all"

Eric Cantor, Politician

About this Quote

Cantor’s line is austerity framed as destiny: voters didn’t just send Republicans to legislate, they sent them with a single, clarifying mandate - “cut spending” - and the promised payoff is “jobs in America.” The causal chain is politically useful precisely because it’s vague. “Create an environment” is a foggy middle term that asks the listener to accept that budget cuts, on their own, coax hiring. It’s less an economic argument than a moral one: restraint equals seriousness, and seriousness equals prosperity.

The rhetoric does two things at once. First, it rebrands rollback as restoration. “Levels of 2008” is a carefully chosen timestamp: recent enough to sound reasonable, pre-Obama enough to signal a return to an earlier governing order. He also narrows the target to “discretionary spending,” a strategic qualifier that dodges the third rails of entitlements while still allowing the speaker to claim dramatic sacrifice.

Second, it stages asymmetry. “The House has acted” casts Republicans as the only adults in the room, then “no counteraction” turns negotiation into a one-way test of legitimacy: either accept our baseline or be accused of having “no position.” The subtext is leverage, not dialogue - a prelude to blaming gridlock on Democrats while defining compromise as surrender to the House’s terms. In the post-2008 recession and early Tea Party era, that posture wasn’t a bug; it was the brand.

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Eric Cantor (born June 6, 1963) is a Politician from USA.

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