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At town hall, Dent is pushed to keep pressure on Trump

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — A week to the day after U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent's opposition played a role in the demise of the proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Republican came face-to-face with hundreds of impassioned constituents at a town hall meeting in his politically divided district.

And their message was, overwhelmingly: Don't let the Trump administration roll over policies cherished by the left.

Dent didn't face the same kind of hostility that some other GOP congressmen confronted — or sought to avoid — in constituent meetings this year.  But the pitched tone of this meeting, Dent's first since the summer, showcased the tightrope he has to walk as he tries to balance the desires of the Democrats and Republicans he represents.

In question after question, the roughly 400 people at the Hanover Township Community Center gymnasium  pummeled Dent with entreaties to stand firm against, not with, the leader of his party.

"Will you stand up against the morass of lies and misinformation put forth by this administration, or will you hide?" asked Doug Eadline, 60, a Democrat whose handwritten question Dent read into a microphone after plucking it from a cardboard box.

Dent, 56, now in his seventh House term, had hardly finished reciting the question before the crowd erupted in hoots and applause.

His district voted for President Trump in November. But the applause that followed Eadline's question reflected Dent's role a week earlier as a co-leader of House moderates who balked at Trump's proposed replacement health-care law. The so-called Tuesday Group feared that the changes sought by Trump and championed by GOP conservatives would strip health care from lower-income residents in Rust Belt districts like theirs.

"This job in Washington is to represent the interests of the more than 705,000 people of this district," Dent told an audience evidently teeming with Democrats during the 90-minute session.

That includes an eye on the president, Dent added. He said that time and again he has been among the first and most vocal to criticize some of Trump's decisions. The president reportedly told another congressman before the health bill's demise that Dent was "destroying the Republican Party."

"I will stand as a check," Dent said. "I have done that. I can say no." In addition to the health-care bill, he cited his opposition to the president's travel ban proposals.

In demanding that health insurance protections remain in place for millions who would lose them under the proposed law, Dent's group faced off against the far-right Freedom Caucus, which sought repeal of President Obama's health-care legislation.

Despite chatter in Washington that both sides may be talking again in an effort to salvage the repeal-and-replace effort, Dent said Friday that "there's not any negotiations going on," and that the groups were "not talking."

During the meeting, constituents demanded that Dent clarify his positions on climate change, the proposed slashing of the Environmental Protection Agency budget, and ongoing investigations by the GOP-controlled Congress into connections that Russian officials had with members of the president's campaign and White House staffs last year.

"What about the right to my uterus," a woman shouted as Dent fielded a question about supporting a gun-rights measure. Dent said he voted against an effort to allow states to withhold federal women's health funding from institutions that perform abortions.

Several times, people in the audience shouted support for universal health care, an even more comprehensive government-mandated insurance approach than Obamacare and one long advocated by left-leaning Democrats.

Dent responded with calls for incremental fixes to Obamacare. Only with help from Democrats would any substantive reforms be enduring, he said.

And one man shouted from the crowd, "Thank you," for Dent's refusal to allow Trump's repeal-and-replace to pass the House.

"I don't work for the president of either party," Dent said, detailing two meetings with Trump last week over his concerns about the bill before it was withdrawn by House leaders. "I work for the people of this district."