Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) this week helped Democrats break a Republican-led filibuster of a short-term extension of unemployment benefits. Brown risks rift with right

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.

At the same time, Brown — who vowed to block the Democratic health care bill during his campaign — has opposed some pillars of the Obama agenda, including announcing this week that he would vote against the Democrats’ bill to rewrite the rules on Wall Street. Democrats say the newly elected senator is misreading his liberal constituency.

“Look, if Scott Brown thinks skipping a tea party event in Massachusetts while voting in lock step with the Republican Party in Washington is going to help him with voters back home — he’s got another thing coming,” said Brad Woodhouse, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, referring to Brown’s decision not to attend Wednesday’s tea party rally with Sarah Palin in Boston.

Asked whether he’s attempting to position himself as a moderate, Brown replied tersely, “I’ll let my votes speak for themselves.”

Earlier this week, Brown joined Collins, Snowe and Voinovich to give Democrats the 60 votes they needed to break a Republican-led filibuster of a short-term extension of unemployment benefits — despite Republican objections that the measure’s $9.2 billion cost should not be added to the deficit. Last month, he voted to approve another short-term, $10 billion, unpaid-for extension of unemployment benefits, saying families in his state were hurting and needed the relief. And he voted with Democrats and against a majority of his Republican colleagues on an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to ban earmarks in years the country carries a federal budget deficit.

“I’ve voted across party lines to move things along to try to get the wheels moving,” Brown said Wednesday. “It’s clear that Washington is broken — I’ve said that during the campaign; I’ve said it here. If my efforts can get things moving, then that’s great. That’s what the people want in my state and in the country.”

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.”

DeMint, who has made it his mission to recruit and elect red-blooded conservatives in the Senate, said his relationship with Brown is fine — but would not say whether he was disappointed with some of Brown’s early votes on spending.

“He’s going to have to find his own footing,” DeMint said.

Asked about the episode with DeMint, Brown called it “old news” and “not a big deal at all,” and his spokeswoman said the two men are “friends” and “have a positive working relationship in the Senate.”

A senior GOP aide criticized DeMint for regularly putting his Republican colleagues — and not Democrats — in uncomfortable positions, but another GOP Senate aide said of Brown: “If the senator is embarrassed by his voting record for deficit spending, he should vote differently.”

Asked about criticism from the right, Brown said he has been “fighting deficit spending” and that he wants to advance some measures that do so in the face of obstruction in the Senate but that he reserves the right to vote against them if they change in any way.

Indeed, Brown voted Wednesday with the GOP to sustain a budget point of order to block the short-term extension of unemployment benefits, a move that Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said was part of a “balanced” approach employed by Brown. The bill is still slated for passage.

“None of the things I’ve voted for have increased the deficit,” Brown said. “And I moved a lot of these things along so they could ultimately be heard.”

So far, Brown has voted with his party 85 percent of the time through his first 88 votes, according to a Washington Post database, an early sign that Brown’s vote isn’t always a sure thing for the GOP.

“We’ve been able to approach Scott Brown on some important issues, and he’s had an open door and open mind, and that helps,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), whose job is to count votes on legislation. “There aren’t that many.”

Durbin’s counterpart, Republican Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona, said Brown came to Washington with the makings of being a “very independent” senator.

“I think Scott Brown is going to be just fine representing his constituency in concert with the majority of his Republican colleagues,” Kyl said.

So far, he’s standing with Republicans on their attempts to scuttle the Democrats’ financial regulatory reform bill, though he said he was “not sure yet” whether it would finance endless Wall Street bailouts — as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other top Republicans are contending.

“I’m always interested in trying to work something through so it is truly bipartisan,” Brown said. “But if it’s the present bill, I can’t support it.”