This is an accepted version of this page Charles Wieder Dent[1] (born May 24, 1960) is an American politician who served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives for Pennsylvania's 15th congressional district from 2005 to 2018.
He earned a master's degree in public administration from Lehigh University and served as an aide to Congressman Donald L. Ritter.
In 2004, Dent won election to the United States House of Representatives, succeeding Pat Toomey.
In the House, Dent became a member of the centrist Republican Main Street Partnership and the Tuesday Group.
In 1998, Dent won an open 16th District Senate seat[8] when Democrat Roy Afflerbach, who later served as Mayor of Allentown from 2002 to 2006, retired to take up an ultimately unsuccessful bid for Congress.
[9] Dent was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 2004, succeeding Pat Toomey, who gave up his seat to challenge Arlen Specter for the U.S. Senate.
[17] In 2014, Dent introduced a bill to give states more flexibility in how they provide health insurance to children from families between 100 and 133 percent of the federal poverty level, according to The Ripon Advance.
[5] In April 2011, after admitting that it was highly controversial, Dent voted along with the other Republican members of the House for a budget bill that would have abolished government-run Medicare.
It proposed to make senior citizens purchase individual private health insurance using vouchers that would have covered only a part of their costs.
The Congressional Budget Office found that privatizing Medicare under this plan would significantly increase the out-of-pocket costs to seniors; by 2030, the out-of-pocket share for standard medical expenses paid by a typical 65-year-old would have risen to 68% under the Republican plan, as opposed to 25% under the then existing Medicare system.
[29] In 2018, Planned Parenthood, which supports legal access to abortion and birth control, gave Dent a 41% lifetime score for voting with their positions and the anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee, which opposes legal abortion, gave him a 50% rating in the same year.
[34][35] In April 2010, Dent introduced a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to issue a Certificate of Loss of Nationality to Anwar al-Awlaki.
He said al-Awlaki "preaches a culture of hate" and had been a functioning member of al-Qaeda "since before 9/11", and had effectively renounced his U.S. citizenship by engaging in treasonous acts.
Al-Awlaki's eight-year-daughter Nawar, also a U.S. citizen, was killed in a SEAL commando raid in Yemen on January 29, 2017.
[39] Dent criticized President Donald Trump's 2017 executive order to temporarily curtail Muslim immigration until better screening methods were devised.
In 2011, he sponsored the Synthetic Drug Control Act of 2011, which sought to schedule a large number of cannabimimetic agents, as well as 26 other psychoactive substances.
[citation needed] Following his resignation from Congress, Dent joined the law firm DLA Piper as a non-attorney policy adviser.
[50] On August 19, 2020, Dent announced his formal endorsement of Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for the 2020 presidential election, joining other Republicans such as Colin Powell, John Kasich, Christine Todd Whitman, Jeff Flake, Chuck Hagel, Susan Molinari and John Warner in choosing to vote for the Democrat in the election.