Rep. Charles Boustany voted for every single trade deal President-elect Donald Trump considers terrible, but that isn’t stopping him from seeking the next administration’s top trade spot.

The Louisiana Republican’s star could be rising as a possible pick for U.S. trade representative, with the outgoing lawmaker engaged in talks with Trump’s transition team about the position, said a source close to the talks. He’s selling himself as having played a leading role in securing passage of one the two major trade enforcement bills Congress enacted last year.

“He has a strong case that can be made for why he is qualified for that position,” the source said, adding that he doesn't view the need to expand trade and Trump’s key priority of stronger enforcement as mutually exclusive.

But Boustany has given Trump only lukewarm support, declining to offer the New York billionaire his full-throated endorsement during the campaign. That contrasts with most of Trump's Cabinet picks so far, who by and large expressed strong and often early support.

Still, the former heart surgeon and Lafayette native’s name is on the tongues of some House colleagues who are in a position to influence the new administration, including fellow lawmakers on the Ways and Means Committee, the source said. He also had close ties to Vice President-elect Mike Pence during the Indiana governor’s tenure in the House, where they championed conservative causes together.

When Pence, who is leading Trump’s transition efforts, was added to the ticket, Boustany praised the decision: “I consider Mike a personal friend,” he said in July.

Boustany won’t be returning to his House seat after failing to clinch a spot in this month’s run-off election for Louisiana’s vacant Senate seat this month, but he has positioned himself as an expert on trade and has claimed an “intense personal interest” in the topic. He made a strong effort to win the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Trade subcommittee in the last Congress but lost out for seniority reasons.

In advocating himself for the USTR job, the lawmaker is aligning himself with Trump by talking up his role in authoring trade enforcement provisions that made it into last year’s Customs and Border Protection reauthorization (H.R. 644). The president-elect is likely to make enforcement a central focus of his trade policy after railing against trade “cheaters” like China.

Boustany had long pursued the measures, which require Customs to act more aggressively against claims of duty evasion. In his coastal district, the measure would help protect seafood producers by preventing Asian exporters of shrimp and crayfish from circumventing steep dumping tariffs.

Devin Nunes, a fellow Ways and Means member who has a seat on the Trump transition team’s Executive Committee, said through a spokesman that he couldn’t comment on whether Boustany was being considered for the position.

Ohio Republican Pat Tiberi, an ally of Gov. John Kasich, one of Trump’s opponents in the GOP presidential primary, called Boustany “a strong advocate for American jobs and ensuring our trade laws are strictly enforced.

“He played an instrumental role when we passed Trade Promotion Authority, and as a colleague of mine on the Ways and Means Committee, I greatly appreciate his leadership,” the former Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee chairman said in a statement.

Last March, however, Boustany did not offer Trump a formal endorsement after acknowledging the likelihood that the real estate mogul would clinch the Republican nomination, saying only that he would support the front-runner if he became the party’s nominee.

In October, after the release of a recording in which Trump boasted of grabbing women by their genitals, Boustany condemned Trump for his “reprehensible” comments. But he indicated the revelation wouldn’t change his vote, and he didn’t disavow the candidate. His spokesman at the time said Boustany was strongly against Hillary Clinton becoming president and urged Trump “to work to repair his relationship with women and independents who are crucial to victory this fall.”

On Oct. 28, Boustany tweeted that he supported Trump, and in a separate tweet the same day he called Clinton the “most corrupt major-party nominee in modern history.”

Trump’s transition team has been circumspect about who the president-elect is eyeing for the position, but during the campaign, Trump indicated that he wanted someone with a business background as his chief trade negotiator.

“I’m a free trader. But the problem with free trade is you need really talented people to negotiate for you,” Trump said in a June 2015 speech announcing his candidacy. “If you don’t have people that know business, not just a political hack that got the job because he made a contribution to a campaign, free trade is terrible.”

Boustany, a co-founder of the Friends of the Trans-Pacific Partnership caucus, will also have to square his penchant for globalism and ardent advocacy for free trade deals — and a voting record to go with it — with Trump’s defensive world view. Labor groups could also be less than pleased with the nomination, given his strong support for most trade agreements that came to Congress during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“Our engagement through international economics, trade, these trade agreements, is vital and is linked to our national security,” he said at an event at the American Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, in 2014. “This is a lesson we learned from the ’30s, it is a lesson we learned post World War II, and it plays to our strengths."

Boustany also told a trade-friendly crowd at the Washington International Trade Association in 2014 that he would be a “champion” for them as Congress wrestled with the Obama administration’s ambitious trade agenda, especially fast-track legislation needed to pass the massive deals the White House was negotiating in Asia and Europe. The group, which is backed by pro-trade corporate sponsors, also recognized Boustany as a congressional leader on trade issues that year.

Despite being a strong proponent of Obama’s signature TPP deal, he tempered his support during the campaign with the argument that the Obama administration had failed to meet the demands that lawmakers laid out in trade promotion authority legislation last year, especially in the area of intellectual property protections for biopharmaceuticals.

A source close to the lawmaker warned that Boustany's role in creating the TPP caucus shouldn’t be taken as his implicit approval of the deal, but rather his desire to see closer congressional involvement in the negotiations. In the end, he felt the agreement didn’t pass muster, the source said.

“I’ve supported the process of getting to a good Trans-Pacific Partnership deal,” Boustany said in an October interview with the Baton Rouge newspaper The Advocate. “Once the negotiations were concluded and we thoroughly reviewed the final text, we don’t have a deal that is satisfactory at this stage. They basically stepped outside of what we laid out in very specific congressional priorities. That’s why it won’t come to a vote now.”

Boustany’s views of the TPP also could have been driven by a tepid response from the U.S. shrimping industry and the fact that rice growers were unhappy with the limited access the deal provided to Japan's market. He said he feared the trade pact would cede Louisiana rice growers’ market share in Mexico to Vietnam, another major rice producer that could make major gains in that Latin American market under the TPP.

Boustany also muted his support for the Asia-Pacific deal out of concern for other sensitive industries in his district. He opposed having TPP open any more U.S. market access for foreign sugar, which would weaken protections for sugarcane growers in southern Louisiana under a program that sets strict market access quotas. In defense of the state’s shipping industry, Boustany has also been a vocal opponent of repealing the Jones Act, a 1930 law that other countries view as a trade barrier because it prohibits foreign-flagged or -manufactured ships from hauling cargo between U.S. ports.

The possible USTR candidate also brings experience dealing with one of America’s most irksome trading partners — and favorite target of Trump — as co-chairman of the congressional U.S.-China working group. But he has been measured in his response to accusations that China is a currency manipulator — a charge Trump leveled repeatedly during his campaign.

Boustany voted against legislation to get tough with China over currency manipulation in 2010, a big priority of labor groups and steel manufacturers. Trump, meanwhile, has pledged to name China a currency manipulator on his first day in office, although it’s unclear what actual steps he is willing to push after that declaration.

The president-elect’s trade advisers softened that position shortly before the election, however, writing in an op-ed that instead of specifically promising to label China a currency manipulator, Trump would “order the Treasury Department to label any country undervaluing its currency to gain competitive advantage over U.S. manufacturers a currency manipulator.”

Still, Boustany’s free trade sentiments largely outweigh his protectionist streak, which could mean he would be seen as an ally by U.S. businesses uncertain of how a Trump administration will affect their efforts to expand in foreign markets.

With some Louisiana’s largest ports in his district, for example, Boustany has been a booster of expanding exports of liquefied natural gas, which are restricted under licensing requirements.

“The prospect for LNG exports, which the epicenter of all of that is in my congressional district in South Louisiana, and also the potential for crude oil exports, all these things are changing the landscape of the international economy, and this is an opportunity for the United States to lead,” he said at the AEI event.

His calls to ease those restrictions are another way his views could naturally align with Trump’s, whose energy plan aims to re-energize U.S. shale gas and crude oil production.

But Boustany has one handicap that could keep him from getting the job. He is a politician, not a corporate titan, and Trump has repeatedly promised to bring in the “greatest business people in the world” to negotiate on behalf of the United States.

“We’ve had people who are political hacks making the biggest deals in the world,” Trump said in October during one of the presidential debates. “We don’t use our great [business] leaders, many of whom back me and many of whom back Hillary. We don’t use those people. Those people are the greatest negotiators in the world.”

Doug Palmer contributed to this report.