"No, he’s been aw­ful. So it would look too much like a sel­lout. Any Demo­crat who did that would be re­viled."

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.”