House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor’s GOP congressional opponent Dave Brat declared that a vote for Cantor is “a vote for open borders and lower wages” on the eve of their Tuesday Virginia seventh district Republican primary.
Brat, a college economic professor that nabbed the support of conservative radio host Glenn Beck Monday, has just hours left to make his case against Cantor, who backs legalization for young illegal immigrants and has signaled support for more guest workers.
“Congressman Cantor has now publicly declared his intention to pass amnesty as soon as he possibly can, with President Obama’s help,” Brat said in a statement provided to The Daily Caller. “He is working hand-in-glove with the Chamber of Commerce to boost the supply of low-wage guest workers for corporations and provide other lavish wall street bailouts at taxpayers’ expense.”
“No lawmaker is more beholden to large corporate funders than Eric Cantor. His corporate donors think they can buy this election,” Brat stated, urging supporters to “defeat the entire crony corporate lobby.”
A recent Daily Caller poll showed Cantor leading Brat 52-39 in the primary race. Cantor has raised more than $2.5 million this election cycle, with banking firm Goldman Sachs representing his third-largest campaign committee contributor.
The primary occurs on the same day that the pro-amnesty campaign “Fast for Families,” led by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) leader Eliseo Medina, is holding a prayer service on the Capitol lawn and meeting with 40 House Republicans to “turn up the pressure” on Cantor.
The SEIU also plans to announce a major partnership in a Tuesday morning teleconference with the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), an evangelical pro-amnesty group that previously met behind closed doors with Cantor and other top Republican House leaders.
SEIU representative Eliseo Medina and a fellow SEIU leader will join two leaders from the NHCLC in announcing a voter registration and voter mobilization campaign “leading up to the 2014 elections and setting the blueprint for the 2016 election cycle.” NHCLC represents more than 40,000 Hispanic evangelical congregations.
Cantor, House Speaker Rep. John Boehner and a small group of top Republican House leaders held a behind-closed-doors meeting with 25 representatives from the NHCLC in July 2013. The meeting reportedly gave NHCLC president Reverend Samuel Rodriguez unexpected optimism about the GOP’s commitment to passing immigration reform.
So who is the SEIU’s Eliseo Medina, the labor leader partnering with the NHCLC, one of the country’s most visible conservative-leaning Hispanic religious groups?
Medina, who served on the National Latino Advisory Council for Obama’s first presidential campaign, is the leader of the “Fast 4 Families” pro-amnesty nationwide bus tour, which held a four-day water-only fast in Cantor’s Virginia home district in April. Medina said explicitly in a 2010 speech that immigration reform will create a long-term progressive “governing coalition.” As TheDC reported, Medina was spotted in a recent videotaped office meeting with new pro-amnesty Virginia GOP executive director Shaun Kenney, a former Cantor political consultant. Kenney’s wife’s firm K6 Consulting is managing Cantor’s primary race against Brat.
And what are some of Kenney’s major political goals?
“The nativists have no home in the modern Republican Party,” Kenney wrote in a February blog post on his website BearingDrift.com. “They have no place in the history of a Free America. … They deserve nothing more than a footnote to the ignorance that liberty rightly stamps out. … Conservatives are smarter than this, and America deserves better than nativist hate. Drive ’em out, ladies and gentlemen. Generations are watching.”
