Republican Rep. Charlie Dent: Say, Maybe We Need to Team Up With Democrats to Elect a Speaker Who Will Represent Both Parties

Forming a, I don't know what you'd call it, but a sort of Washington DC Omniparty or something. Just spitballin' here.

Republicans may be forced to solicit Democratic help to break their Speaker stalemate, Rep. Charlie Dent (R) said Thursday.

The Pennsylvania centrist, who often serves as a mouthpiece for outgoing Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), said there is only a small handful of Republicans who can win 218 GOP votes to fill Boehner's shoes. The trouble is, none of them wants the job.

"We may need a bipartisan coalition to elect our next Speaker," Dent told reporters after Thursday's closed-door GOP meeting. "That's a very real possibility right now, and I think anybody who's honest about this knows it. They may not want to talk about it, but they know it."

When he says no Republican can secure 218 votes from within the party, what he means is that Establishment "centrists" like himself will refuse completely to support a Freedom Caucus candidate like Daniel Webster.

That means that to insure an Establishment candidate, he thinks they'd have to reach out to Democrats to secure Democratic votes.

So he'd prefer a coalition with Democrats than with other Republicans. Striking deals with Democrats is just business, but striking the same sort of deal with conservative members of his own party is just unthinkable.

We continue to see this pattern: The Establishment expects and demands that conservatives vote for their squish candidates. When conservatives refuse, they call them "unreasonable," "crazy," etc.

But they themselves refuse to even entertain the possibility of voting for a conservative. Note that the possibility of voting for Daniel Webster or Jason Chaffetz (himself fairly Establishment-friendly) is not even considered as a possibility at all. It is not even on the menu of options.

Thus necessitating, in Dent's mind, a coalition with Democrats. The possibility of a coalition with conservatives has not even entered his mind.

posted by Ace at 11:30 AM

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