Charlie Dent's Busy Week

            With Syria as the hot button issue in Congress, it was a necessity for our representatives to let their constitutes know their stance on the issue. Charlie Dent has been strongly against military action in Syria from the start and he doesn’t seem to be budging. As stated in my last post, Charlie believes that any chance we had to help Syria was long gone now that hundreds of thousands of civilians have already been killed. He doesn’t see the point in killing more and more since America doesn’t seem to have any specific plan on how the strikes will occur (Penn Live, 2013). While Dent has been set on this decision from the start, two interesting things happened for him in Congress this week.

First of all, Dent was named as one of the congressional whips on the Syria issue (The Hill, 2013). This is a really big deal for Dent seeing as how anti military action in Syria that he is. As a whip, Dent has the opportunity to persuade congressional members who are on the line about Syria in order to get them against it as well. Although Obama has already decided that he will strike Syria even without Congressional approval, it be interesting to see how well the whips against Syria, including Dent, can or can not sway other members of Congress and succeed in making the President look as if he has no real public support. This is also an important move for Dent because it shows his constitutes that he is pushing for issues that he believes in as well as issues they believe in.

            Regarding Syria, another hot button issue has been Vladimir Putin’s involvements in this whole mess.  Although Dent has made clear that he will not support military action in Syria, he doesn’t necessarily automatically support Putin (who is also against strikes in Syria but for his own reasons). The New York Times wrote a piece on Putin portraying his view on Syria and at the end he claimed “and I would rather disagree with a case he [President Obama] made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States policy ‘is what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.’ It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation” (Charlie Dent, 2013). Basically, Putin was claiming that Obama is doing America a disfavor by making statements that portray America as the most powerful or the best run country. Being a representative that truly cares about America, Dent did not agree with the statement made by Putin and his disagreement was so prominent that he felt the need to state his opinion. Dent responded by saying, “What is truly dangerous is what happens when a nation’s leaders convince its citizens that they are not exceptional. What is dangerous is a government that seeks to curtail the exceptionalism of its individual citizens by trampling their personal liberties and freedoms and by ruthlessly stifling free speech that opposes the policies of government leaders” (Charles Dent, 2013). Going right along with all Charlie’s work in civil rights, he is not going to let a leader who diminishes its people to say anything about how Obama treats his. While Charlie may disagree with Obama on some issues, such as Syria, it doesn’t mean that he does not support America as a whole. Sometimes, when representatives take strong stances against the President it can look as though they may be against that president or against America at the moment. Dent made clear that just because he does not agree with one decision does not mean that he is not anti-Obama. Also, just because he may have a similar view on Syria as the Russian president, Dent wanted to make sure that his constitutes in no way believed that he would ever support Putin.

            Overall, it has been a pretty busy week for Dent. These upcoming weeks will be even busier as Dent takes on his position as a Congressional whip and eventually forcing Congress to come to a decision on Syria. It will be interesting to see how Congress sways on the issue and I think it will be good for all the representatives to finally come to a consensus.

References:

http://dent.house.gov/index.cfm?p=PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=171ad2d1-c619-4285-837a-7586067716ad

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/319933-the-hills-syria-whip-list

http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/09/a_vote_of_no_confidence_on_syria_what_next_on_syria.html#incart_river_default