CHARLIE DENT IS LEAVING CONGRESS BECAUSE: “ACHIEVING GOOD GOVERNANCE TODAY IS FAR TOO DIFFICULT”

…House Representative, Charlie Dent

 

Three moderate Republican lawmakers are leaving the Congress & the GOP.

 

Is the latest decision from the 7 term Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania, Charlie Dent’s statement that he has decided to retire, is this the start of those disillusioned, moderate Republicans in Congress, starting to give up on the GOP?

 

If you just listen to Rep. Dent’s retirement statement, that could be what is now beginning to happen.

 

Per Rep. Dent: “As a member of the governing wing of the Republican Party, I've worked to instill stability, certainty and predictability in Washington.  I've fought to fulfill the basic functions of government, like keeping the lights on and preventing default. Regrettably, that has not been easy, given the disruptive outside influences that profit from increased polarization and ideological rigidity that leads to dysfunction, disorder and chaos.”

 

Wow, what a way to announce that you aren’t going to seek an 8^th term in the House.

 

Dent has been totally exhausted with his battles against his own party’s House Freedom Caucus and with his frequent clashes with Donald Trump’s White House.  Dent is currently the co-chairman of the moderate GOP Tuesday Group, which has about 50 center-right members. Now, that’s more than the three dozen or so members of the Freedom Caucus, but those Tea Party types punch well above their fighting weight because they usually vote together as a single block.

 

Dent has increasingly drawn the wrath of the Trump movement for Dent’s willingness to publicly express concerns about Trump, while many of his House GOP colleagues are scared and will only offer negatives against Trump “on background”. This congressman even called for Trump to drop out of the election when the “Access Hollywood” tape emerged last October.  He then went and voted for the independent candidate: Evan McMullin instead of his party’s offering.  Since January, he’s spoken out against the president’s travel ban, his firing of James Comey as FBI director and Trump’s false moral equivalency statements after Charlottesville.

 

A loud-mouth Pennsylvania state Representative, Justin Simmons had previously announced that he would challenge Dent in a primary next year, emphasizing the incumbent’s lack of support for Trump. “Like many Republicans, I used to support Charlie Dent,” Simmons said in the news release kicking off his campaign. “But in the past year, Charlie Dent has completely gone off the rails.”

 

Dismissing the challenger as an opportunistic “phony,” Dent released the embarrassing text messages that he received from Simmons last year.  One of them actually asked, “Do you think there’s any chance the party can replace Trump on the top of the ticket?  Instead of facing off with Simmons, Dent has decided that this is not his idea of a sensible Republican Party, so he is stepping aside.

 

But he is not alone.

 

Another seven-term moderate has also announced that he will retire.   Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA), who represents a suburban Seattle district that Hillary Clinton carried, is chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade. Breaking with the protectionist president, Reichert wrote a goodbye statement emphasizing the importance of free trade to the Pacific Northwest. “From serving on President Obama’s Export Council; to battling to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank; to leading the fight to pass the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement; I have always fought to give our exporters the chance to sell their goods and services around the world,” he wrote.

 

A third moderate, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), also expressed concern about the direction of the party when she revealed her plan to step down this spring.  She is the first Cuban American elected to Congress.  She also expressed confidence that if she ran, she would get reelected, even though Clinton won her Miami district by 20 points.  But she stated the prospect of two more years in the current environment, just didn’t appeal to her. “It was just a realization that I could keep getting elected, but the real issue is not about getting elected,” she told the Miami Herald in April.

 

Ros-Lehtinen, is the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and has spoken out loudly against Trump on issues like deportations including the latest DACA issue.  Also the president's statements on transgender rights as her son is a transgender and on the Trump budget cuts. “I'm not one of those name-callers that think the Democrats don’t have a single good idea,” she said. “Too many people think that way, and I think that's a detriment to civility and of good government.”

Even as relations continue to fray between Republican congressional leaders and Trump, Democrats say these retirements are just the latest proof that the Trump supporters have completed their hostile takeover of the GOP. “With Trump in charge of the GOP, they might as well have a sign on the door that says ‘Moderates need not apply.’ ”  This was said by Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, who previously ran the independent expenditure arm of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.  “The last cellblock has fallen and now Trump's inmates are running the asylum. Dare to stand up to Trump by thinking people should be able to keep their health care or by opposing white supremacists, and you'll find there is no home for you in the Republican party anymore. That's dangerous for the next two years and for the next 20. Whether it's in Seattle, Miami or now Allentown, the GOP is pushing out the only leaders who could convince suburban voters there was a way to get a home in the Republican Party that wasn't Trump-owned.”

 

As for Dent, Charlie is a close ally of GOP leadership.  Dent also serves as chairman of the House Ethics Committee and he is a powerful “cardinal,” which in congressional-speak that means that he chairs an Appropriations Subcommittee.  That is where Dent controls tens of billions in annual spending related to veterans’ affairs and military construction.  But while acknowledging that Trump is a factor, Dent says that the trends driving him to give up this immense power predate the current president.

The ideological makeup of the House Republican Conference has changed markedly since Newt Gingrich seized the House majority in 1994. When the party won back the lower chamber again in the 2010 midterms, after four years in the wilderness, the success of the Tea Party movement meant that there were relatively fewer moderate Republicans like Dent than ever before.

 

Republicans had dominated the redistricting process and thus they drew lots of safely Red districts. This meant that many House members became more in line for a primary challenge from their own far-right, than from a general election challenge from a Democrat. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor went down in a 2014 primary challenge, and the Freedom Caucus formed that very next year.

 

This created additional for Republican House members to become part of the unofficial “vote no, hope yes” caucus. This is a group of right-wing Republicans who want spending bills and debt-ceiling increases to pass, but they won’t support them because they fear retaliation from the outside conservative groups. The departure of Barack Obama from the Oval Office has helped this issue, but “vote no, hope yes” remains a powerful force that the House Speaker, Paul Ryan must contend with every day.

 

The result of all this showed up this week in the White House.  These “no” votes have forced some Republican leaders to turn to Democrats for the necessary votes to pass any key bills. That has given House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) more leverage than she would have otherwise. The result is that final deals are now less conservative than they would normally be.

 

People like Dent, who considers himself a serious conservative, they are constantly banging their heads against the wall because of this.  Dent has explained that solving problems requires “negotiation, cooperation and, inevitably, compromise.”  That seems impossible for most of the Republican Party today.  "Compromise" to them is a "Dirty Word".

 

The 57-year-old Dent said he has been having “periodic discussions” with his wife and three kids about whether to stay in Congress ever, "going back to the government shutdown in 2013.” He said discussions about retiring “increased in frequency earlier this year, and that he made the decision to step down in midsummer” before he drew the obvious primary challenger. “Accomplishing the most basic fundamental tasks of governance is becoming far too difficult,” Dent explained to The Washington Post “It shouldn’t be, but that’s today’s Republican reality.”

 

Dent is now the 13th Republican to leave the House since the start of 2017. Four have accepted jobs in the Trump administration, and three more are running for a governor’s position. Dent is the sixth to retire without another position in mind.  But as a point of comparison, seven Democrats have announced plans to leave the House. All but one, Rep. Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts did so to run for higher office. Only one represents a district Trump won: Rep. Tim Walz, who is now a front-runner to become the next governor of Minnesota.

 

The election of Trump hasn’t opened the flood gates of people leaving the Republican Party, that is “as yet”, but it’s only 7 months into his term and he is the most unpopular president this early in a first term.

 

Watch this space.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017