June 11, 2014 12:14PM # Tea Party Discovers Eric Cantor’s Record on Federal Spending By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE I was as surprised as everybody else by David Brat’s defeat of Eric Cantor yesterday. But I’m not really surprised that Tea Party-type voters were tired of Cantor’s voting record. In 2010, I [noted](https://www.cato.org/blog/born-again-budget-hawks-r-bs) that Cantor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, and Rep. Paul Ryan had published a book, *Young Guns*, which cast the Republican congressional leaders who preceded them as a group that “betrayed its principles” and was plagued by “failures from high-profile ethics lapses to the inability to rein in spending or even slow the growth of government.” But, I wondered, how credible were the messengers? Once you ruin a brand, it can take a long time to restore it. And part of the solution is owning up to your own errors, not just pointing the finger. Sadly, I discovered at the time that the authors didn’t have very clean hands when it came to the overspending and overregulation of the Bush years. Most relevantly for today, I found that Rep. Cantor [voted for](http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2001/roll145.xml) the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, expanding federal control over education. He [voted for](http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll455.xml) the costly Iraq war in 2002. He [voted for](http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2003/roll669.xml) the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act in 2003, which was projected to add [more than $700 billion](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3671) to Medicare costs over the following decade. He [voted for](http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll681.xml) the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which included the $700 billion TARP bailout. To be fair, he did get A’s and B’s in the [annual ratings](http://www.ntu.org/on-capitol-hill/ntu-rates-congress/) of Congress by the National Taxpayers Union, which means he had a better record on spending than most of his colleagues. But as the Tea Party’s been complaining, that’s not saying much. David Brat, a professor of economics, promised in his campaign to “fight to end crony capitalist programs that benefit the rich and powerful.” While I’m disappointed in his opposition to sensible immigration reform, I hope that if he does get to Washington he’ll bring a revitalized Tea Party message of fiscal responsibility and opposition to big business cronyism. ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).