Eric Cantor, who is soon to be the number two Republican in the House of Representatives, has some tough words for his party.

Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, poised to ascend to House Republicans' No. 2 leader this week, said the Republican Party in Washington is no longer "relevant" to voters and must stop simply espousing principles. Instead, it must craft real solutions to health care and the economy.

The problem is, for all of the talk from Cantor, in reality all he and the House Republicans are offering is more of the same.

Mr. Cantor said Republicans should "be very wise about the battles we fight," but that they should fight every time there's a principle involved. For example, he disagrees with pundits who say Republicans should forgo issues such as immigration.

"It's not a dead issue. It's about how do we go about finally enforcing the law, and that's both in the interior as well as at the border," he said, adding that Democrats are likely to overreach if they go for a bill that offers citizenship to illegal immigrants, which he said is "amnesty."

Fine by me. If House Republicans want to hew to the type of knee-jerk conservatism that has lost them close to 60 seats during the last two election cycles, then they very well may find out that 60 isn't the limit on the number of seats they can lose. And specifically on the issue of immigration, if the Republicans want to write off Hispanic voters for a generation -- in effect doing to the entire Southwest (and in fact also large swaths of the rest of the country, too, including states like Virginia, Florida and Iowa) what they did to California, changing what was once a swing state into a deep blue one -- I say go ahead; a Democratic House majority with 270 or 280 or 290 members wouldn't be a terrible thing for the country.