Fetterman: Here’s Why the Shutdown Is ‘Fundamentally Wrong’

Although his party on Friday once again denied Republicans the votes necessary to reopen the government, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania has been slamming his fellow Democrats for their shutdown gambit from the beginning.

“We shouldn’t be having this conversation. You shouldn’t be shutting our government down,” Fetterman told The Daily Signal on Friday. “When the Republicans were doing it, we rightly criticized them, attacked them for doing that … . Don’t shut it down. It’s fundamentally wrong.”

When asked for his reaction to the Office of Management and Budget’s freezing of infrastructure funding in blue states, Fetterman once again put the blame on his Democrat colleagues.

“Why would you even invite those things to even happen?” he responded. “Why do this s—?”

Fetterman also can cite one historically backed reason for why he disagrees with Senate Democrats seeking any sort of deal from their Republican counterparts: There’s no guarantee President Donald Trump would sign off on it.

“Doesn’t the president have to sign off, even if there is a deal?” he said. “Don’t we all remember when we had the bipartisan border deal? What happened?”

Fetterman was referencing a 2024 bipartisan Senate border deal that would have lumped border funding together with aid to Ukraine and Israel. 

Trump effectively killed Republicans’ temptation to compromise with Democrats on the border issue by writing on social media that Republicans should “only make a deal that is PERFECT ON THE BORDER.”

Trump “tanked that, and he wasn’t the president, and he didn’t have to sign that thing. So, what I’m saying …  Where’s the leverage? Because ultimately, doesn’t he have to sign off on any of it anyway?” said Fetterman.

The Pennsylvania senator also speculated that Trump could be tempted to employ what is known as the “nuclear option”—having the Senate lower the threshold for bringing the stopgap funding bill to the floor down from the 60 votes that are currently required to a simple majority vote.

“How much longer before the Republicans can even carve this out of the filibuster, too?” asked Fetterman.

When a reporter asked him whether getting rid of the filibuster is something Democrats might even want Republicans to do, his response was surprising.

“I’m saying I think they [Republicans] probably should,” he replied. ”If you’re able to get out of the filibuster to prevent either party, make it a lot harder to shut the government down—I absolutely support that.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told Punchbowl News on Thursday that he had not spoken to Trump about nuking the filibuster, but that “that’s not good for anybody … . We should avoid that at all costs.”

Throughout the process, Fetterman has not taken part in the Democrats’ standoff at all and has not waged a war of words with the White House. In fact, he thinks some of Trump’s shutdown jokes are funny.

“Somebody can put me in a sombrero and a mustache, you know, whatever, I’ll laugh at it, too, because we can all laugh at ourselves,” he said of the White House, in reference to Trump’s viral repost of a clip Photoshopping a sombrero and mustache onto House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.