Cuellar, a Blue Dog cochair, said he hopes to set up a meeting for sometime next week. However, he added that he and his fellow members view the invitation with suspicion. Firstly, he said they aren’t sure if the offer is sincere.
“I don’t know if he’s using us as a pawn,” he said. “When they said, ‘Maybe we’d be willing to work with Democrats,’ was that a way to say, ‘Hey, tea-party folks, straighten up or we’re going to work with them’? Or was he really sincere that he wanted to work with us? We don’t know.”…
“I don’t think that’s going to work, and I’ll tell you why: It’s not like he’s been OK and then to get a couple votes, he does what people do in Washington, which is throw a few goodies around. No, he’s been awful. So it would look too much like a sellout. Any Democrat who did that would be reviled,” Ellison said. “You’d get a lot of attention you didn’t want from your colleagues.”…
Still, some said they could work with the administration on a limited basis. On Tuesday, Rep. Gerald Connolly expressed interest in a new White House effort to overhaul the government workforce, which includes information-technology modernization. On topics such as tax reform and infrastructure, however, he said the calculation is trickier, especially because of the president’s unpredictability.
“They’re both minefields. As a generic topic, yes, there’s potential. That’s about as far as you can go right now,” Connolly said. “Because you don’t want to find yourself halfway through a bipartisan negotiation and have the president tweet, ‘We’re going to kick every Croatian out of the country,’ and now you look like this fool who got played.”
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