Even though I have always lived in the state of Illinois, I did pay close attention to the 2022 U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, between the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, and Republican snake oil salesman Mehmet Oz.
I really wanted Fetterman to win because I felt like much was at stake for me personally. Fetterman had a stroke during his campaign, and I thought it was noteworthy that he didn’t just shake it off and quickly re-emerge unscathed, like a hokey Hollywood script. Fetterman stayed in the race and struggled publicly with the aftereffects of his stroke. When he spoke, his train of thought often seemed to derail. When listening to others speak during public campaign events, he made use of closed captioning, because his brain suddenly had an easier time processing written words rather than spoken ones.
It was clear that Fetterman had joined the disability community. He was now officially one of us. And he had a reputation as a political progressive.
So when he won that election four years ago, I celebrated, writing for The Progressive: “He seems like the type of person whose disability experience would leave him with a sense of empathy.”
I was sooooo wrong!
On March 19, Fetterman broke with his Democratic colleagues to cast the tie-breaking vote to advance the nomination (by the squatter currently occupying the White House) of Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican from Oklahoma, to replace Kristi Noem as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The nomination was then able to move forward to a full vote on the Senate floor and Mullin was confirmed.
Mullin, as was pointed out during his confirmation hearing, had challenged a union leader to a fist-fight during a hearing in 2023, and stated in February that he “completely understood” why Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, was violently attacked by his aggrieved neighbor in 2017. Paul, who cast the sole Republican vote against Mullin’s appointment, remarked: “I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force.” But Fetterman was able to seize this opportunity to show that he had no such qualms.
That was hardly the first time that Fetterman has undermined Democratic consensus against the Trump Administration. The Working Families Party, a minor party that bills itself as fighting for “workers over bosses and people over the powerful” has even dedicated a website entitled “Primary Fetterman” to chronicling the many instances in which Fetterman has sided with Republicans.
“We supported John Fetterman in 2022,” the group said. “Since then, he’s sold us out. It’s time to replace him.”
I tried to give Fetterman the extreme benefit of the doubt. After all, bucking the Democrats isn’t automatically a bad thing, if it’s done for the right reasons. Maybe he would say that he got confused and thought he was voting for Mark Twain, even though he’s been dead for more than a century.
But Fetterman says he’s just trying to be “open-minded.” The problem is that being open-minded can only work when the people on the opposite side are also open-minded. And the words open-minded have never described the squatter who currently resides in the White House. Thus, open minded people get manipulated and used and that’s how people like the squatter and Markwayne Mullin gain control of the levers of power.