Mitt Romney’s Senate Replacement Defiantly Distances Himself from Trump: ‘Anybody Who Wants to Give Me Heat … Bring it On!’
Representative John Curtis (R-UT), who was voted in to replace outgoing Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), said Republicans should not expect him to bend to President-elect Donald Trump’s will just because they’re in the same political party.
ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Curtis about his views on Trump’s “mandate” from voters to enact his MAGA policies.
“You do hear some of your colleagues, your future colleagues, in the Senate that say, ‘He won. He’s got a mandate, he deserves, you know, everybody that he’s chosen,'” Karl said of Trump’s cabinet nominees. “So, in other words, ‘rubber stamp’.”
“Yeah, I heard that from my son, by the way, at Thanksgiving,” Curtis said. “He said, ‘Dad, I’m a self-described, I took the red pill.’ So he kind of set that up. And my response to him was a couple of things. One, in kind of a joking way, I said, ‘You know, I did get more votes than him in Utah. Does that give me a mandate?’
“But let me come back to this kind of this concept that I think me speaking my mind and, and me being up front makes the president a better president. And right now, I’m interviewing these nominees. And I think people forget the advice part of ‘advice and consent.’ I can’t advise the president if I haven’t thoroughly talked to these people, if I haven’t investigated everything about them, if I haven’t learned their strengths and their weaknesses. And I think I owe that to the president. And I think if the better job I do, the better president he will be.”
Karl pointed to social media posts questioning why Curtis doesn’t “just get in line already” with Trump’s directives.
“Listen, anybody who wants to give me heat for doing my job, bring it on,” Curtis said. “This is my job. It’s my constitutional responsibility. These same people are the same people who would have said earlier, ‘You need to take power back from the executive branch. You need to do your job.’ I have heard that from these very same people, and that’s what I’m doing.”
Watch the clip above via ABC News.
