Cantor Speech Expands His Visibility and Party Vision - NYTimes.com

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, seeking to soften the image of a Republican Party that has been focused almost exclusively on budget cutting, laid out an expansive social agenda on Tuesday for education, health care, job training and scientific research ? what he called ?creating the conditions for health, happiness and prosperity.?

Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization in Washington, Mr. Cantor, the House majority leader, joined a broader Republican effort to expand the party?s appeal in the wake of last November?s electoral beating and to move beyond an endless cycle of budget showdowns that began as soon as the Republicans took control of the House in 2011. He embraced offering illegal immigrants brought to the country as children a path to citizenship, a policy he once opposed. And though he has in the past endorsed proposals to turn Medicare into a system that offers seniors a fixed subsidy to buy private health insurance, Mr. Cantor on Tuesday embraced simpler approaches to cutting health care costs.

?In Washington, over the past few weeks and months, our attention has been on cliffs, debt ceilings and budgets, on deadlines and negotiations,? he said. ?But today, I?d like to focus clearly on what lies beyond those fiscal debates.?

That message was somewhat mixed, however. In the morning, leaders emerged from a meeting of the House Republican Conference to tout legislation demanding that President Obama produce a budget that balances in 10 years ? or at least projects when it would come into balance. The afternoon was spent responding to the president?s demand that Congress act now to head off automatic, across-the-board spending cuts to defense and domestic programs, set to begin in March. Those cuts, known as ?sequestration,? were set up in 2011 to help defuse the first ? but not the last ? showdown between Republicans and the White House over raising the government?s borrowing limit.

But after a 2012 Republican campaign that revolved around such deficit debates, Mr. Cantor set out to show that House Republicans have a broader vision for governance ? and to raise his own profile as a party leader.

He pointed to a San Francisco public schools policy that expands choice within the school system and allows financing to flow with students to schools that are most attractive. Under the policy, more money is awarded for low-income students, children with disabilities, and those that speak English as a second language.

?So there?s an incentive for schools to seek the more vulnerable populations, and reasons for schools to differentiate themselves and to excel,? Mr. Cantor said in a rare show of support for a city synonymous with political liberalism.

Federal school financing formulas should adopt the same approach, encouraging choice between public, private and charter schools, he said. Higher education assistance should encourage students to go into science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields by prompting universities to disclose unemployment rates and earning potentials for all areas of study. And the nation?s visa and immigration system should be tilted toward offering foreign students studying science, engineering and technology a way to stay in the country.

?One of our priorities this year will be to move heaven and earth to fix our education system for the most vulnerable,? he said.

Financing for federal research should shift from social sciences to hard sciences as well.

Many of the policies Mr. Cantor embraced ? school choice, streamlining federal worker training and changing labor laws to allow workers to eschew overtime for time off ? have been Republican agenda items for more than a decade. But they have largely dropped off the radar screen for a singular focus on deficit reduction. His support for a comprehensive immigration overhaul might have been most noteworthy, although he kept his support to broad principles.

Moderate Republicans expressed relief that they would have new issues to raise with their constituents.

?It was just refreshing to hear someone talk about education,? said Representative Richard Hanna, Republican of New York.

Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, said, ?As a party, we sometimes get too much into the green eyeshade discussion at the expense of everything else.?

Source: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/cantor-speech-expands-his-visibility-and-party-vision/

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