A historic Republican sweep of the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday has propelled Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the minority whip, to the verge of becoming the highest-ranking Jewish lawmaker in U.S. political history.
Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was reportedly arrested Saturday following the reformist\’s defeat at the polls by hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of Mousavi, the main challenger to Ahmadinejad, responded to the election with the most serious unrest in Tehran in a decade and charged that the result was the work of a dictatorship.
The 111th U.S. Congress is slated to have 13 Jewish senators and 31 members of the House of Representatives, with with the two first-time victories of Democrats Jared Polis of Colorado and John Adler of New Jersey.\n\n
It was a stellar night for the Republicans across the nation, and Tuesday\’s dramatic election results, with the GOP snatching back control of the Senate and tightening its grip on the House, will be a big boost for the foreign policy agenda of the Bush administration.
But with a razor-thin majority in the Senate, where the filibuster rules, the Republican leadership will not exactly have a blank check on the domestic front — good news for liberal Jewish groups.
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