Advertisement

Party Of No: Cantor Hints At Opposing Obama’s Housing Plan Before It Is Even Released

“With pressure growing for government action to stem foreclosures,” President Obama will travel to Phoenix, AZ tomorrow to formally unveil his housing relief plan. Already, it seems, conservatives are preparing to stage a partisan fight against Obama’s housing legislation, just as they did with the economic recovery package.

Interviewed by CBS yesterday, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), who was instrumental in securing the no-votes against the stimulus, previewed some of the conservative talking points against Obama’s housing package and all but hinted that he would oppose the plan:

CANTOR: When you’re looking at the policy here, you’ve got to start with the fact that 93 percent of America’s families are current on their mortgages and, frankly, are out there wondering, you know, who is going to pay for this continued succession of bailouts? … We just cannot continue to pay for the kind of things that this administration thinks that we can. So, I’m very concerned about the direction I see us going, but I know that this president has continued to say he wants to work with us, and I hope we can get it right.

Harking back to the stimulus, which conservatives view as a winning electoral strategy, Cantor added, “You know, we’re on the heels, right now, of the almost $800 billion stimulus bill, not having any real knowledge of what’s in that 1,100- page bill and, frankly, working to make sure that the public’s right to know is realized.” Watch it:

Advertisement

It is ironic that Cantor may oppose Obama’s housing plan. Several GOP members of Congress, including influentials like Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), spent the last several weeks slamming the stimulus plan for allegedly not addressing the housing crisis. Cantor himself wrote in an op-ed, “Also critical will be addressing the housing crisis.”

Yet Cantor has apparently already decided a day ahead of time that he will oppose the very efforts to tackle housing.