Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said he might vote to confirm Mitt Romney if President-elect Trump chooses the 2012 GOP nominee to lead the State Department.
Romney is reportedly a leading candidate for the job, despite his attacks against Trump during the presidential primaries. But Trump might also pick former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a dogged surrogate for Trump throughout the presidential election.
“I probably in all likelihood would support that because I think Romney would be a way better face to the world, representing our great country, than would Newt Gingrich, who’s a bit of a demagogue, and [Rudy] Giuliani, whose character is an issue by most people,” Brown said on WAKR radio. “I didn’t vote for Romney in ’12, you know, I voted for Obama, but Romney seems to be an honorable person who understands the dignity of public service.”
Such compliments were hard to come by in 2012, when Brown was at ground zero of Obama’s campaign to win re-election by reminding Ohio voters of Romney’s opposition to the auto bailouts and attacking his record as a venture capitalist. “It’s really an ultimate betrayal of our country and the middle class,” Brown told MSNBC in 2012. “I think he’s part of a group of business people who saw the best way to do business was shut down production here and move it abroad … make it there and sell back to the United States.”
That strategy helped Obama win re-election, but in 2016 many of the working class voters who felt alienated from Romney voted for President-elect Trump, which is a dynamic that Brown has to keep in mind as he prepares for his own re-election campaign in 2012. “It’s what Trump does that I’m concerned about and, as I said, I’ll support him when it helps Akron and helps Ohio and I’ll fight like hell when it doesn’t and we’ll see where he goes on these issues,” Brown said on the radio interview, which was first reported by CNN.
Brown’s willingness to vote for Romney would be a more critical news event under the old rules of the Senate, when a minority of just 40 senators could block a cabinet pick by refusing to end debate on the nomination. Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., changed those rules by deploying the nuclear option — a vote to change the rules by a simple majority, even though the written rules of the Senate stipulated that rule changes must be backed by two-thirds of the Senate — in order to prevent Republicans from blocking President Obama’s picks. “For a presidential appointment, not a judge, just 51 votes, a majority, is the American way,” Brown said in 2013.
The Ohio Democrat seemed to forget that rule change briefly during the interview, when he was asked if other Trump cabinet picks might face a filibuster. “It’s a possibility,” Brown said. “I don’t think you make it a habit.”
