Republican senator-elect Scott Brown has won a warm welcome on his first visit to the US Senate since his shock victory in the race to succeed the late Democratic icon Ted Kennedy.
Brown met with a handful of his future colleagues on Thursday, including top Democratic allies of President Barack Obama, and vowed to quickly study the often arcane Senate procedures saying he would not vote in lockstep with Republicans.
"I don't owe anybody anything," Brown said as he met with Democratic Senator John Kerry, also of Massachusetts. "If I see a bill that is good for my state, I'm going to vote for it, and that's my first priority."
Brown's victory stripped Obama's Democrats of their already fragile 60-vote super majority, enabling gleeful Republicans to stall legislation like the president's top domestic goal, remaking US health care.
Kerry, a longtime friend of Kennedy who had sometimes sharp words for Brown in the campaign leading up to Tuesday's vote, said he hoped the newest US senator would be sworn in "as expeditiously as it can happen."
"You have to work across the aisle here to make things happen. Americans don't just elect Democrats and Republicans, they elect people to be responsible with the people's business. I look forward to working with Scott," said Kerry.
Brown, who appears set to take the oath next week, first visited Republican Senator John McCain to thank him for his early support of his long-shot bid for the seat Kennedy held for nearly half a century.
"Senator Brown represents, I think, the dreams and the hopes and the frustrations that Americans feel today. And they want the kind of leadership that the commonwealth of Massachusetts just sent us," said McCain.
Brown said McCain "was one of the first people to actually, you know, look me in the eye in this very office and say, 'Well, it's a long shot, but I'm with you if you feel you can win it.'"
Brown, who also met with Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, said he would try to keep his sense of humour and hoped his future colleagues and Obama would as well.
He said he spoke with Reid by telephone late on Wednesday and "we had a nice talk, cracked a few jokes."
"When I spoke to the president, we had a lot of laughs, and I told him he has to keep his sense of humour because you need to," said Brown. "That's one of the things that kind of insulates me from a lot of the negativity."