Henry Cuellar a "Blue Dog" Pro-Life Congressman

A Q&A With The House Democrat Who’s Voted With Trump 75 Percent Of The Time - He says that more Democrats should embrace his Blue Dog ways to win back the House.

Excerpt:

My district is about +7 Democratic, but it’s still a diverse district in many ways. I do better than most Democrats here even though I’m a moderate conservative Blue Dog and I still do very well here. My hometown of Laredo, the border area, I’ll get 90, 95, 98 percent of the vote, so I must be doing something right here. I think people know that I will vote my district, and they know I’m bipartisan and they know that I’m not here to represent the Democratic Party. I think the best way to describe my position is what President Lyndon Johnson said many years ago where he said, “I’m an American, I’m a U.S. Senator, and I’m a Democrat, all in that order.”1 And I agree with him in the sense that we’ve got to come up here and vote the district.

The way we won the majority in 2006 was because of the Blue Dogs. The way we win the majority again is through the Blue Dogs again. I told the DCCC, I told the House leadership, and they gave me a nervous laugh. How did we lose veterans? How did we lose a lot of the labor folks to Trump? When people think that you’ve got to be a “pure Democrat” in our image, they’re wrong. When we lost Blue Dogs because a lot of us voted for health care and a whole bunch of other things, we lost the Democratic leadership.

Comment: On Pro-Life. Home page for the Blue Dogs . Facing extinction as the party moves left.