Shocker! Eric Cantor loses to Tea Party's Brat

Hold off on those Tea Party obituaries for a while...

RICHMOND, Va. — House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was toppled on Tuesday night in the most shocking primary defeat since Republicans took the House in 2010.

Dave Brat, a local economics professor who had tea party support, became the second challenger to defeat a House incumbent this primary season. Texas Republican Ralph Hall lost to a tea party insurgent at the end of May.

Brat also halted one of the most meteoric rises in national politics, and his win illustrates the strong anti-incumbent fever that has taken over Cantor's Richmond-area district.

Cantor's defeat not only reorders Virginia politics, where Cantor was the highest-ranking Republican, but it completely throws the House Republican leadership into flux. Cantor, 51, was long seen as the next speaker of the House.

I'd love to say more about this but I'm tried up on a wild goose chase on a completely different story (don't even ask...). It just goes to show that it's hard to go far enough to the right for today's GOP -- remember, it was Cantor who pushed to shut down the government for Obamacare, but I guess Republican voters didn't like the fact it was re-opened. More to the point, conservatives probably perceived Cantor as too far to "the left" on immigration reform.

Anyway, , consider me shocked. Everybody is.