Over the past
week, Dent has definitely faced some controversy in the news. His own
constituents have been writing to the Morning Call [Lehigh Valley’s Newspaper]
and formally calling Dent “the ironic representative”(The Morning Call, 2013). As
mentioned in my last post, Dent went ahead and represented America at the Global
Citizens Music Festival, where he planned to educate and get awareness about
the Global Poverty Project, an organization that is an attempt to end world
poverty. In face value, this looked like Dent was doing a great thing, but
instead he was being very “ironic.” Last week, Dent voted to cut 4 million
dollars from the Food Stamps program in the United States (New York Times,
2013). So how then, can Dent go and represent this organization to end poverty?
Food stamps are something that it supposed to help poverty, not hinder it. In
the past, Dent has voted on things accordingly, such as “No Subsidies Without
Verification Act” and a bill that “authorizes states to require federal welfare
work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” (Project
Vote Smart, 2013). Therefore, it seems that Dent thinks that people are reaping
the benefits of government subsided programs and not doing anything about going
out and finding a job. He doesn’t want undeserving people getting these
programs that are meant for people who really do need help. That is an
understandable position to take, but it makes no sense that Dent would then go
out and promote ending World Poverty. His constitutes don’t seem overly happy
by their posts on the morning call, making comments such as “is he serious?”
and calling his appearance at the festival a publicity stunt (The Morning Call,
2013). If it was just a publicity stunt, Dent just put himself in a pretty bad
situation with the people who will vote for or against him in 2014. It is a
very good thing that he is not up for re election this year because who knows
how that would turn out if people think of Charlie Dent as a two faced
representative.
Charlie
Dent’s ironic trend for the week didn’t stop there. Charlie Dent has been
working with the NCAA to address the Penn State scandal involving Jerry
Sandusky. After the scandal, the NCAA took away a large amount of scholarships
from innocent football players in an attempt to punish the football program as
a whole (The Morning Call, 2013). Dent is trying to push the NCAA to return all
scholarships, calling the action of taking them away in the first place “deeply
flawed” (The Morning Call, 2013). Dent also claimed that the NCAA President “is
not looking out for the best interests of the student athletes” and that “in
order to exact a pound of flesh from Penn State, they went after innocent
students who had nothing to do with the underlying incident” (The Morning Call,
2013). Dent feels close to the issue since he is a graduate from Penn State. While
again, this looks good at face value, I see this also as quite ironic. In
voting for a huge cut in food stamps, Dent didn’t think about the innocent
people who would suffer for the mistakes of the people taking advantage of the
system; the bad guys. But then all of a sudden in the Penn State incident, Dent
felt that innocent people shouldn’t suffer from the mistakes of the bad guys in
that situation, a.k.a Jerry Sandusky. This is a double standard. Although the
issues may be totally different, the underlying message that Dent is sending is
the same. It confuses me how he could care for the innocent people in one instance,
and then not even consider them into his decision in another. It will be
interesting to see how these recent decisions affect how Dent’s constitutes see
him. Like I stated earlier, Dent luckily isn’t up for re election again until
2014. I am curious to see if this will affect his generally high approval
rating and give him problems being re elected next year.
References:
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