Romney’s Senate replacement is as anti-Trump as Mitt was

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The lawmaker who was voted in to replace outgoing Utah Sen. Mitt Romney dared critics to “bring it on” as he distanced himself from President-elect Donald Trump.

Sen.-elect John Curtis (R-UT), told ABC’s Jonathan Karl in an interview that he was “speaking my mind” on the “mandate” that voters gave Trump in November’s election, explaining he would not be a “rubber stamp” for the incoming administration.

“It’s very important to me that President Trump is successful. I want to see him wildly successful, and I’ll be supportive of him when he’s talking about inflation and the economy and everything like that,” Curtis said on ABC News’s “This Week.”

(Video Credit: ABC News)

“But that doesn’t mean there won’t be moments when I disagree with him,” he added. “I do have my own mind, and I’m not a rubber stamp. My stamp is the stamp of the state of Utah.”

“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 as he spoke of Trump’s cabinet nominees.

“So, in other words, ‘rubber stamp,’” he added.

“Yeah, I heard that from my son, by the way, at Thanksgiving,” Curtis replied. “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 upfront makes the president a better president,” Curtis continued. “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.”

Curtis said the issues he has with Trump’s nominee for Department of Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, “remain unresolved.”

“And I shouldn’t try to resolve them until I have this big broad canvas of information about him,” he added.

Karl noted that social media users question why Curtis won’t “just get in line already” with Trump’s direction.

“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.”

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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida. Powers also contributes to BizPac Review.