Why Eric Cantor Going To Head Big Pharma Is Super Swampy

Of course he did.

That cynical reaction perfectly summed up the recent news that former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., will become the next head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) in November. If not exactly a match made in heaven, the two seem made for each other — for many of the wrong reasons.

Cantor Lost His Congressional Job for Ignoring Constituents

People tend to forget that Cantor’s June 2014 loss in a Republican congressional primary to future Rep. Dave Brat — the first loss by a House majority leader since the position’s creation — was a secret hiding in plain sight. It wasn’t just that Cantor went soft on immigration in ways that troubled his constituents; it’s that Cantor had little time for his constituents, period. As a local Virginia-based reporter noted after Cantor had lost:

You could tell wherever you went that Cantor was incredibly unpopular, that people saw him as arrogant. … Dave Brat gave me his cellphone number when I first met with him, and I pretty much had him to myself.

The local reporter “had Brat to himself” because national reporters didn’t bother to — or want to — cover the Brat-Cantor race. As The New York Times put it, “No one wants to stray from the white-hot center of power for fear of being stuck in some forsaken locale when something big happens in Washington.” (Talk about swampy.) And do you think the corporate media would listen to the likes of Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, or Laura Ingraham when they promoted Brat over Cantor on their shows? Me neither.

Even when they did cover the race, national reporters largely missed the plot. Six weeks before the primary, Jake Sherman, then of Politico, wrote, “Brat has little chance of upsetting Cantor … who will almost certainly become the next speaker of the House.” We’re still waiting for that prediction to come true (thankfully). Therein lies the story of that election: a swampy congressman and the swampy press, neither of whom could be bothered to listen to, or care about, what voters actually thought. It turns out both of them had something coming to them.

After Getting Fired by Voters, Cantor Went to Wall Street

Shortly after losing his primary, Cantor left Congress. He didn’t even wait to finish out his term, quitting in August 2014. Within weeks, the New York investment bank Moelis and Company announced it had hired Cantor, who ended up staffing the company’s Washington office.

The move brought with it ironies related to both his past job and his future one. After having been rejected by voters for not having views that comported with theirs, Cantor decamped to a place even further removed from the American heartland and Main Street. But now, having spent the past decade-plus at a firm that advises big corporations on mergers and acquisitions, will he bring his Wall Street connections to bear if some combination of Congress and the administration — either President Trump or a future Democrat one — attempts to squeeze the pharmaceutical industry?

PhRMA’s Republican Lobbyist Helped Pass Obamacare

As someone who worked on Capitol Hill during the debate on Obamacare in 2009-2010, I recall that the head of PhRMA at the time was another former Republican member of Congress: Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., who had served as chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, with jurisdiction over most health care programs. 

While working as PhRMA head, Tauzin played a key role in helping get Obamacare enacted. His organization and the pharmaceutical sector became the first to make a “backroom deal” with Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., then the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and the Obama administration in support of Obamacare. In fact, Tauzin bragged to The New York Times about what a good agreement he got for his industry:

[The White House] wanted a big player to come in and set the bar for everybody else. … We were assured: “We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal.”

Not only did PhRMA make an agreement to support Obamacare, but it also ran ads supporting the legislation — ads run by White House adviser David Axelrod’s firm, which just so happened to owe Axelrod $2 million in severance and employ his son.

But all the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing also went directly against Barack Obama’s promise that all the health care negotiations would be televised on C-SPAN, as he pledged repeatedly during his 2008 campaign:

The “rock-solid deal” was the most infamous example of the swamp in action. And the public has been paying the price ever since Obamacare’s passage, in the form of increasing consolidation leading to higher prices, as even Democrats now admit.

PhRMA and a swampy former Republican congressman helped cook up a royal mess for the American people a decade and a half ago. God help us with what will happen during the sequel.