House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R – VA) lost his primary challenge to relative unknown David Brat, who ran against him on surveillance issues. The real loser may have been the military industrial complex, who had no better friend in the Congressional leadership.

There are a lot of hawks out there, but there were few as outspokenly supportive of deficit-pumping military overspending than the outgoing majority leader, and that had a lot of fiscal conservatives hoping to challenge him for the position. Now, they won’t have to.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R – TX) is one potential new leader in the post-Cantor era, and he and others bring more interest in sequestration and keeping spending under control, something that won’t sit well with the outgoing leadership, or the lobbyists behind them.

Cantor has long been railing against the Tea Party and other advocates of spending cuts as “isolationists” for believing the US could only afford a finite number of wars.