Toomey IS Conservative! His ACU Rating is 97%, higher than Rick Santorum’s rating which was in the 80s. If Toomey is a RINO, then so is Santorum who voted for a lot of Bush’s big government expanding bills.
I can’t believe we’re going to automatically denigrate him already.
(He is just another weak Republican...afraid of the press)
“Pat Toomey gets the fact that he needs to work with a lot of folks, that there doesn’t need to be unanimity on all issues in the party,” said Washington lobbyist David Urban, an influential GOP moderate and a host of the event.
Urban was Sen. Arlen Specter’s chief of staff from 1997 to 2002, when the outgoing Pennsylvania senator was still a Republican. He stayed loyal when Specter became a Democrat last year, and he returned to the GOP fold after Specter lost the May 18 primary to Rep. Joe Sestak.
Urban is helping to connect Toomey with moderate Republicans in the capital and from the Specter camp. He calls Toomey “more of a fiscal conservative than a social conservative.”
Toomey has tried to show that he is no ideological fire-breather.
For instance, Toomey said he would have voted last year to confirm now-Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, though many Republicans opposed her. He also has argued that Republicans should stop driving away supporters and candidates who favor abortion rights. Toomey even has said some nice things about President Obama.
In a May 2009 op-ed piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Toomey argued for tolerance among Republicans on party members’ abortion views. He outlined a vision of a GOP with room for vigorous debate on how to achieve the “unifying idea” of individual freedom and limited government, but “I would certainly not suggest that those who disagree with the pro-life position be banished from the Republican tent.”
Last summer, in an Inquirer opinion piece, Toomey argued that Sotomayor, Obama’s first nominee for the Supreme Court, should be confirmed because, he said, she was “mainstream” in her legal thinking.
“When a president of one party is elected, the proper role of the opposing party is not to go on politically charged ideological campaigns against judicial nominees,” Toomey wrote. “It should be limited to determining whether a nominee is well-qualified and within the legal mainstream.”
You have been conned.