October 03, 2011 10:48 PM UTC

Gardner on Cantor, Boehner, GOP Debt-Ceiling Infighting

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• by: Colorado Pols

A very interesting and lengthy write-up this weekend in New York Magazine profiling the controversial GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor–a must read for anyone looking to gain insight into the workings of the new House majority.

With some interesting color commentary from Colorado’s own freshman Rep. Cory Gardner, talking about his relationship with Cantor as a candidate and the leadership role Cantor played working both with and against Speaker John Boehner during the recent debt-ceiling debate. Make sure you read the whole article, here are a few relevant excerpts:

Obama and other Democrats have never been as furious at Cantor as they were this past July during the debt-ceiling fight. For weeks, Obama had been negotiating with House Speaker John Boehner over a so-called “grand bargain” that would cut spending and raise taxes in exchange for a debt deal. But Cantor, who forcefully channeled tea-party Republicans’ opposition to any tax increase, had helped scuttle those talks. On a Wednesday afternoon, during a hiatus in the Obama-Boehner negotiations, a group of congressional leaders met for over two hours in the White House Cabinet Room, with Obama doing most of the arguing for the Democrats and Cantor for the Republicans. As the meeting was drawing to a close, Cantor and Obama repeated their arguments one final time-and then Obama erupted. “Eric, don’t call my bluff,” the president reportedly said. “I’m going to the American people with this.”

…Since the 2010 election, of course, Cantor has had a much more lethal weapon at his disposal, one that he played a major role in creating: the 87 freshmen who make up more than a third of the Republican’s House majority. In the run-up to the midterms, Cantor, along with McCarthy and Ryan, used their “Young Guns” candidate-recruitment program to find Republicans who could capitalize on the growing tea-party backlash against Obama and Washington. “We wanted to bring ’cause’ people to Congress,” says Ryan, “not people who were looking for political careers.”

The downside to recruiting non-career politicians is they don’t necessarily know how to run for office, so Cantor taught them the ropes. “He was always calling with advice,” says Cory Gardner, a freshman from Colorado. “I oftentimes wondered, now, surely he can’t call everybody because how much time does he have? But then I got to Congress, and I discovered that he was calling everybody.”

You might recall a few months ago when fellow Colorado freshman Rep. Scott Tipton indicated in an interview that his “trust” in Speaker John Boehner had been “damaged”–as a freshman in the lion’s den of Congress, one would assume that there was somebody else Tipton felt he could “trust,” right? Tipton and Boehner seem to have patched things up since then, but perhaps the above story from Gardner on Cantor’s helpfulness provides a clue? Here’s another as the New York Magazine story continues:

Cantor loyalists insist that his actions during the debt-ceiling negotiations were an attempt to help Boehner, not undermine him. “Eric was trying to save Boehner from himself,” says one congressman close to Cantor. Had Boehner agreed to a grand bargain with Obama, it would have sparked a revolt inside the GOP conference. As next in line-or “the conscience of the conference,” in the words of Colorado freshman Cory Gardner-Cantor would have been under tremendous pressure to challenge Boehner for the speakership. Some Cantor allies believe he could have won such a challenge…

That certainly leaves some questions unanswered: would Gardner have supported a “Grand Bargain” compromise like the one Boehner and Obama were negotiating? We know Tipton didn’t, and discounted the threat of default during the debt-ceiling fight, which would have earned him a spot among what Vice President Joe Biden called Cantor’s “Luddites” in this story.

But what about Gardner? It’s clear that Gardner was a member of Team Cantor based on the glowing assessment of the help he received during his campaign. But Gardner’s status as a full-on “Tea Party” obstructionist has always been a little less clear, ambiguity that “Cagey Cory” doesn’t really object to–especially with obstructionism going out of style. How much did Gardner approve of, or cooperate with, Cantor’s sabotaging of Boehner and the “grand bargain?”

Because this article implies quite a bit–perhaps more than Gardner has ever let slip about the internal GOP politics of the debt-ceiling debate. If the obstruction of 2011 doesn’t become a liability in 2012 for Republican freshmen, that’s one thing. But if it does, Gardner might find himself regretting even the guarded admissions he’s made in this story.