The Cantors occupy Wall Street

In a recent post about the prospects of passing amnesty legislation in the House, I referred to the Majority Leader as Eric “Wall Street” Cantor. Some readers probably wondered where I was coming from.

This article in Politico may help explain. Politico reports that Diana Cantor, the wife of the Majority Leader, has joined the board of Revlon, the cosmetic giant.

You may recall Revlon’s role in the Monica Lewinsky matter. After the end of Lewinsky’s affair with Bill Clinton, Vernon Jordan, Clinton’s fixer, helped arrange for Lewinsky to interview with Revlon. When Lewinsky told Jordan that the interview hadn’t gone well, he called Revlon’s CEO, Ronald Perelman. The company then offered Lewinsky a job. Clinton thanked Jordan for making this happen.

Perelman is still in charge of Revlon and he also still runs the holding company, MacAndrews & Forbes, that owns a large chunk of the Revlon. According to Politico, Perelman is now a close friend of Eric Cantor and his wife. He dines with them in New York, and the majority leader reportedly has slept in Perelman’s home.

Perelman is a major donor to Cantor’s political campaigns – he has donated $47,300 to Cantor’s various political committees. Employees of MacAndrews & Forbes have also made significant donations to Cantor.

According to Politico, Diana Cantor sits on the boards of three other major corporations: Universal Corporation, a tobacco company; Media General, which formerly owned newspapers including the Richmond Times-Dispatch; and Domino’s Pizza. She recently left the board of The Edelman Financial Group.

I have nothing against Ms. Cantor sitting on corporate boards. And Eric Cantor is, of course, free to pick both his friends and his financial backers.

But conservatives can’t realistically expect Eric Cantor to buck the interests of big business, including its interest in seeing amnesty legislation passed as part of a deal in which business — big and small — gets what it wants on the immigration front.

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