President Obama left House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., out of a rare meeting with top congressional leaders of both chambers, just one day after White House Press Secretary Jay Carney cited the president’s desire to work with Cantor as a sign of bipartisanship in this election year.
“I believe the House Majority Leader put forward on Politico some of his policy proposals and there’s real opportunity to work to get a lot of that done,” Carney said during the White House briefing yesterday. “And it goes right to the point that I’ve been making that conventional wisdom holds that we can’t actually accomplish things that both the administration and a Congress controlled largely by the other party can agree on.” Carney was responding to Republican complaints that President Obama refuses to work with Congress on domestic policy fronts.
Today, Obama held his first meeting with Republican leadership since the debt-ceiling fight last year — but Cantor was not invited. “The group was limited to only the top congressional leaders: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi,” Politico reported today. “That left out House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.”
When Cantor and Obama last met, Obama reportedly walked out of debt negotiations with Cantor after the Majority Leader interrupted him three times.
