What the fiscal-cliff deal says about Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor

One man wants to be president. The other craves the speaker's gavel

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan listen to Speaker of the House John Boehner.
(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Conventional wisdom is that yesterday's fiscal-cliff agreement marks a major victory for the president and congressional Democrats and is a significant blow to Republicans. Indeed, on Wednesday morning, the Drudge Report’s banner headline declared, "Republican Horror New Year." Over at The Huffington Post, the headline read, "Take Your Medicine: GOP Caves, House Bill Passes..."

Here's the problem: This conventional narrative dramatically overstates the real world consequences as well as the political (fake world) fallout. Indeed, CBO anticipates the deal might actually add $4 trillion to the country's debt. So suffice it to say, we can expect many more fiscal cliffs in the not-so-distant future, dramatically lessening the sustained political consequences of this particular vote. More interesting is what we learned in the past few days about some big-shot Republicans leaders. Namely, Paul Ryan wants to be president, Eric Cantor wants to be speaker, and Mitch McConnell is the most important fellow of the bunch.

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Jeb Golinkin is an attorney from Houston, Texas. You can follow him on twitter @jgolinkin.