U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent got a text message early one Saturday morning last January from his son, an engineering student at Penn State University, who is prone to sleeping in. The message read: “I need to talk to you about something.”
“I thought that this can’t be good,” said Dent, the seven-term Republican congressman. “It’s way too early to be hearing from him.”
So he quickly dialed his phone.
His son told him that a friend from back home had called to say that relatives were being detained at Philadelphia International Airport. The family, Syrian Christians with visas in hand, had been told they would have to get on a flight back to Doha after waiting nearly 15 years to join their family members in Allentown.
It turned out that while the family was in the air, President Donald Trump, who had been sworn into office just one week earlier, had signed an executive order denying citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries entry into the United States. And Syria was on the list.
Dent sprang to action.
He called a former legislative aide he knew on Capitol Hill who had just been given a job at the White House. He asked him how an order with such sweeping implications was passed.
Had it been run by the Department of Defense? Did the Department of State sign off on it? How about the Department of Homeland Security? What about the Department of Justice?
The answer he received again and again from the other end of the line: “No.”
“I wasn’t looking to get in the middle of this whole travel ban discussion but the issue came to my doorstep – literally,” Dent said. “But when the press asked me what I thought about the situation I told them the order was seriously flawed and horribly implemented.”
Some people thought he was bashing the administration. Dent said he was just speaking out against a poorly constructed policy that had been rammed through without regard for rational understanding and conventional standards.
Like it or not, Dent was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight.
“I didn’t go looking for a fight, the fight came to me,” he said.
Chris Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College who has been following Dent’s career for decades, said that was the moment the centrist politician became the primary source for those looking for unfiltered commentary of the GOP in the age of Trump.
“I think 2017 was the year that the Trump revolution came face-to-face with the traditional Republican Party. And Charlie Dent, in many ways, became the face of the traditional Republican Party as it clashed at times with the president,” he said. “I think what happened this year is that, as Trump redefines what contemporary Republican politics is all about, more traditional Republicans have struggled to coexist, and at the forefront of that struggle was Charlie Dent.”
Having become known on Capitol Hill as a member willing to criticize his party and its president when it offers him little political advantage and requires tremendous political courage, Dent is the Reading Eagle’s 2017 Pennsylvania Newsmaker of the Year.
Becoming more visible
Since being elected to Congress in 2004, the 57-year-old Lehigh County lawmaker has spent much of his career carefully balancing his membership in the Republican Party with his centrist reputation.
His 15th Congressional District – which includes all of Lehigh and parts of Berks, Dauphin, Lebanon and Northampton counties – leans Republican. According to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, the GOP has a 4-point advantage even though Dent has shown significant crossover appeal. Trump carried the district last year by 8 points, while Dent won by 20 points.
Dent is chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on military construction and veterans affairs. But he gained notoriety in recent years for speaking out against the most conservative faction of his party, particularly its refusal to compromise with Democrats on such basic tasks as passing routine spending bills and increasing the federal debt limit.
When the House voted in 2010 to let the Defense Department repeal the ban on gay men and women from serving openly in the military, he was just one of 15 Republicans in the House and Senate who supported the legislation. When the House renewed the Violence Against Women Act in 2013, he was one of only 87 Republicans to support the legislation.
And when the government shut down a few months later after House Republicans refused to take up a resolution the Senate was willing to pass because it failed to chip away at the Affordable Care Act, he openly voiced his frustration with the leaders of his own party.
“I think many people have confused pragmatism with liberalism,” he said. “They think that in order to be a good conservative you can’t be pragmatic. That’s simply not true. Our system requires give and take, it requires consensus, it requires compromise.”
It’s those tightrope performances that have made him one of the most visible figures in national politics. The lawmaker is frequently featured on cable networks like CNN and in publications like The New York Times.
“A national platform is not something I ever really sought,” Dent said. “But several years ago I started feeling that the Republican Party, House Republicans in particular, were being defined by a few of our members who I would say were on the extreme. Some of our members with the shrillest voices were the ones on television all the time and making some fairly incendiary comments. I felt those voices ended up branding the rest of us and I decided somewhere around 2013 that it was important for me to counter that narrative.”
Challenging the president
Now that Republicans dominate two branches of the federal government, his position as a leader of the centrist Tuesday Group and participation in the nonpartisan Problem Solvers Caucus has elevated his ability to stop unfavorable legislation. It has also placed him in the direct path of a president who Dent says values loyalty over principle.
Dent, who voted for independent Evan McMullin in the general election, has been one of only a handful of Republicans in Congress to openly challenge the president and his policies.
He has called Trump morally “indefensible,” he criticized the travel ban for being “rushed and unfair,” and he blasted the firing of James Comey as the FBI director was investigating the administration. Dent advised Trump that “impulsive” tweets are not the way to set policy and condemned Trump’s comment that “both sides” were to blame for violence at an alt-right rally in Virginia.
But the most contentious split with Trump came during the House GOP effort to replace the Affordable Care Act.
Days after releasing a statement that the proposal failed to protect people with pre-existing conditions and would hurt states like Pennsylvania that expanded Medicaid, Dent was summoned to the White House for a meeting with the president. When he explained why he would be voting against the legislation, he was singled out by Trump for “destroying the Republican Party.”
Dent said he let the attack roll off his back.
“The people of this district expect me to work with the president – not for the president,” he said. “My constituents recognize that we have three separate but equal branches of government. I believe very strongly that we need to be a check on the executive branch of government regardless of who occupies the White House.”
Dent said he’s not interested in being a lackey for a president.
“There are plenty of sycophants running around Washington but I’m not going to be one of them,” he said.
Mostly common ground
While Dent may not be willing to let Trump go unchecked, he’s found several issues where the two agree.
He voted in support of overhauling the tax code, giving the government more power to deport and deny admission to immigrants suspected of being in gangs and penalizing states and localities that have “sanctuary” laws on immigration and delaying implementation of ozone standards. In fact, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, Dent votes in line with Trump about 91 percent of the time.
U.S. Rep. Ryan Costello, a Chester County Republican who is also a member of the Tuesday Group, said he admires Dent for his blunt style. The second-term legislator said he has learned a lot from watching the veteran lawmaker.
“There are a lot of people who are worried about how what they might say will impact them politically. But Dent is a case study for why speaking your mind and being unapologetically pragmatic is what constituents actually want from their representatives,” Costello said. “He is an expert at policy and can kind of predict what’s going to happen months in advance. He calls it like he sees it.”
Dent, who came from a working-class home in Allentown and went on to study international politics at Penn State, has long been a supporter of regular order. The phrase refers to rules and precedents that have been followed in Congress for generations with few exceptions for legislation both big and small. But it also implies a presumption of at least some degree of bipartisanship.
Dent said that concept has been missing from Washington for quite some time.
“A lot of the polarization predated Trump: We had the purists versus the pragmatists – and the pragmatists were largely the governing wing of the party,” he said. “The old litmus test was ideological conformity. And the new litmus test is loyalty to Donald Trump.”
Stepping aside
By most accounts, 2017 was truly the year Dent came into his own.
He had an almost weekly presence on TV, his Twitter feed became a must-read for those interested in what was happening on Capitol Hill and in July, he was the subject of a cover story featured in Politico, the ultimate political insider publication.
“Dent was speaking for a significant portion of individuals who consider themselves Republicans and want to remain Republican who felt that the president’s brand was not theirs,” Borick said. “He expressed his views and spoke out at his own peril. It’s very difficult to challenge a president of your own party. It takes political courage and I think there are others in Washington who might have shared the same view but didn’t do what he did for fear of retribution, for fear of the blowback that might come from the White House.”
All that made what would happen next all the more shocking.
Dent announced in September that he would not seek re-election.
He said Trump was not the reason he decided to retire, but acknowledged he was a factor.
Dent explained that he had started thinking about retirement during the government shutdown in 2013 but was encouraged by then-House Speaker John Boehner to stick around. And through a number of retirements and resignations in his own party, he was able to secure high-profile chairmanships on the Appropriations and Ethics committees.
“That’s why I decided to run in 2014, and when 2016 came around I thought I had a pretty good shot at getting a seat on the Intelligence Committee but then Boehner departed in the middle of that cycle,” he said. “And, you know, I didn’t really enjoy that campaign because it felt like all we were doing was talking about Donald Trump. It seemed like every other day he said something that, honestly, would have disqualified anyone else for office. So after going through all this I decided I would do something else.”
The bigger picture
Dent said he’s not sure what he wants to do next but that he’s not ruling out anything. That list includes a permanent gig on national TV, a job at a consulting firm or even another run for office down the road.
Costello said Dent will be missed – particularly by those who hope to break through the dysfunction in Washington.
“Part of his legacy will be the way he stayed true to himself and to his district while letting the political chips fall where they may,” he said. “And the other part will be his perspective on how to make government function and how to strategically deal with obstinate forces that sometimes keep things from getting done.”
Dent’s decision to leave is part of a larger trend facing Republicans.
According to a tally by the political publication Roll Call, 18 House Republicans have decided to step down, and an additional 10 have decided to run for another office. Most notably, political experts say these retirements represent a troubling trend that has thinned the ranks of moderates within the GOP.
G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, said a potent combination of congressional redistricting, growing political polarization and increasing tension from Trump to fall in line has contributed to a shrinking corps of consensus builders.
“Charlie Dent has always had his own independent style about him. It could be in this case that he just grew tired of fighting what appears to be an uphill battle in that caucus, which since the Tea Party movement election of 2010, has changed dramatically,” he said. “Moderates are now virtually without a voice and have grown uncomfortable with the agenda that is being pushed.”
Madonna said he thinks the public should be concerned that ideologues from both sides dominate Congress. The unwillingness to compromise and the bitter partisan divisions that we see, he said, will only get worse as moderates continue to leave.
