Toomey: I won’t be a ‘rubber stamp’ for Trump

by Jordain Carney - 11/10/16 4:37 PM ET

GOP Sen. Pat Toomey (Pa.) is signaling he’s willing to buck President-elect Donald Trump on areas where the two disagree.

“There will be times when I disagree with Donald Trump and when I disagree I will say so. I will not be a rubber stamp for anyone,” Toomey, who won reelection by a slim margin on Tuesday, told reporters at a local campaign office, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

{mosads}But he added he expects that Republican senators will be looking for ways to “relate” to the president-elect once Congress returns to Washington for the lame-duck session next week.

Potential areas of agreement, according to Toomey, would be on rolling back President Obama’s executive orders and filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

On nixing ObamaCare, expected to be a top Trump priority in 2017, he added that any replacement needs a transition for those currently insured through ObamaCare that “goes into effect as quickly as it can and leads us to a marketplace driven by consumers and not bureaucrats.”

Trump, after meeting with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in the Capitol on Thursday, listed healthcare as one of his top priorities, in addition to immigration and “big league” jobs.

Toomey waffled for months over whether or not to support Trump, before announcing roughly an hour before polls closed on Tuesday that he had voted for him. He had pledged to serve as a check on the power of whoever was elected.

He told a local radio station separately on Thursday that he “was not expecting” the real estate mogul to win.

Tags Donald Trump Mitch McConnell