Scott Brown: Republicans don’t want government shutdown in cuts standoff

Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) said Monday that he does not believe Republicans want a government shutdown, but that both parties need to come together to tackle the nation’s deficit problems. 

“I’m hopeful that everyone will kind of get in a room and just hammer things out and look at the budget and say, ‘Yes, we can keep this; we can’t keep that,’ and send a very important message to the people of the country and the world that we’re serious,” Brown said in an interview on NBC’s “Today.”

Talk about a potential government shutdown has increased of late. The GOP-controlled House passed a spending measure recently that cut some $60 billion from current spending levels for this fiscal year, but Senate Democrats have indicated that legislation has little chance of gaining traction in their chamber. 

With both the House and the Senate out of Washington this week, lawmakers will be back in Washington for just a few days before the current law funding the government expires on March 4. Republicans have indicated that any short-term measure on government funding would need to include spending cuts. 

Brown, who captured the Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy in a special election last year, is making the rounds with the news media to discuss his new memoir, Against All Odds. In the book, he writes about being sexually abused by a camp counselor when he was a child, something that neither his wife nor his parents knew about fully. 

“In retrospect, it would have been nice to have told somebody,” Brown said. “But that’s the problem when you’re in that situation. The abusers say, you know, ‘If you tell anybody, I’ll kill you’ or ‘They won’t believe you. I’ll make sure they won’t believe you.’ And I was a perfect candidate back then for that type of control.”

The Massachusetts senator also signaled that he had not considered running for president and was looking forward to seeking a full six-year term next year.