"Scott Brown risks rift with right"

Scott Brown risks rift with right
By MANU RAJU | 4/15/10 5:06 AM EDT

When an aide to Sen. Jim DeMint used her Twitter account to call out Sen. Scott Brown and other Republicans for breaking ranks on a jobs bill, an annoyed Brown confronted DeMint on the Senate floor after privately suggesting he may have been attempting to stir up trouble with the conservative base.

DeMint said it wasn’t so, and the two men are downplaying the spat now.

But the divide between Brown and the Republican conservative base is at risk of growing — as it did this week when Brown joined moderate Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio to help Democrats overcome a GOP filibuster on an extension of jobless benefits.

“I assume there will be votes that he’ll throw to the other team to show that he’s the new guy from Massachusetts and not the new guy from Texas,” said Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist in Washington. “But I just don’t think that spending money is the way to do that.”

Brown, 50, still maintains celebrity status on the right, and he’s one of the few freshmen to carry a national profile; on Sunday, he’s scheduled to be a guest on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” a rare Sunday morning appearance for a newly elected senator. And for now, most Republicans in the Senate and conservative activists off the Hill have given him a pass, saying he represents a different constituency than most of the other 40 Republicans and needs to position himself in the political middle in order to stand a chance at winning reelection in 2012.

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One of his first votes back in February was to approve a $15 billion jobs-creation package, which he said “contains measures that will help put people back to work” but which some of his fellow Republicans said would be ineffective and was filled with budget gimmicks aimed at making its cost appear marginal. And last month, he joined 10 other Republicans to vote for a $17 billion version of that bill, which would temporarily give employers payroll tax breaks for hiring unemployed workers and pump cash into highway and transit programs but add $13 billion to the mounting federal debt.

And that position prompted DeMint’s aide to call out Brown and the other defectors, catching Brown off-guard.

DeMint told POLITICO that his staff simply responds to inquiries from voters wanting to know how Republican senators vote on any given issue.

“We’re always going out and saying this is how the GOP voted,” DeMint said. “It’s crazy for any of us to think any of our votes are private. Scott’s fine with that. ... So we’re not trying to bash anybody; it’s just that folks have a right to know how they’re voting.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/35833.html