Earlier today Eric Cantor, R-Va and House Majority Leader, walked out of the debt ceiling negotiation meetings he’d been participating in with VP Biden and others. He claimed it was because the mean nasty Democrats insisted on getting tax revenues as well as spending cuts into any deal to raise the ceiling.

There’s speculation in some parts that he’s doing this to make Speaker John Boehner cut a deal with the Dems, thereby putting Boehner’s job as Speaker at risk with the Tea Party Republicans in the House. That’s what Ezra Klein thinks:

One analysis of the House GOP right now is that there are two players in the GOP who can cut a budget deal: Eric Cantor and John Boehner (and, on some of the other budget issues, Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers). One of them is going to have to do it. Which means one of them is going to lose his job. The optimistic take is that what we’re seeing right now is a game of musical chairs over which one of them it’ll be.

But the pessimistic analysis is that if you had to write a plausible scenario for how America defaults on its debt, or at least seriously spooks the market, this is how it would start. After insisting on using the debt limit as leverage for a budget deal, the Republican leadership finds they can’t actually strike a deficit-reduction deal, but nor can they go back on their promise to vote against any increase in the debt limit that isn’t accompanied by a deficit-reduction deal. What follows is a lot of jockeying and fingerpointing, a short-term increase or two, and eventually, a market panic.

Cantor is putting personal power before country here, and in a very dangerous way. If Boehner actually does manage to cut a decent deal despite Cantor’s effort to throw him under the bus, he may not hold on as leader of his party, but unlike Cantor, he’ll deserve to. For better or worse, this is when we learn whether anyone on the Republican Party’s leadership team is actually prepared to lead.

I don’t know whether that’s true or not. What I do know from my observations of Cantor is that he’s just the type to throw a tantrum when he doesn’t get his way.

We’ll soon see whether there are any grownups left in the Republican House. The trouble is, if there aren’t, a global economic meltdown might be the result.