Fetterman’s Case for Helping GOP Nuke Filibuster Is Faulty
Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman has notoriously been taking an unorthodox path since Donald Trump reentered the White House. It’s a matter of some dispute as to whether Fetterman’s growing estrangement from his own party has anything to do with his medical and mental-health struggles following a 2022 stroke. Regardless of these concerns, Fetterman’s political situtation is becoming increasingly fraught, particularly for someone once firmly ensconced in the progressive, Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.
Fetterman has famously criticized other Democrats for saying mean things about the 47th president. He has split from them on certain confirmation votes (he was, for example, the only Democrat to vote to confirm Pam Bondi as attorney general). He has defended ICE against Democratic criticism. And most conspicuously, he has become perhaps one of the Senate’s most hardcore supporters of everything Israel has done in its war with Gaza. Public-opinion polls in Pennsylvania show he is now more popular with Republicans than with Democrats.
So it wasn’t particularly surprising when Fetterman joined two of the 47 Senate Democrats (Catherine Cortez Masto and Angus King) in voting for the Republican-sponsored stopgap spending bill at the end of September, rejecting the conditions most Democrats placed on cooperating to keep the federal government open. Fetterman is, however, placing himself on an island by agreeing with far-right Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Chip Roy that it’s time to crush the Senate Democratic opposition by “nuking” the filibuster, as The Hill reported:
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) told reporters Tuesday that he would support Republicans using the so-called nuclear option to override the Senate filibuster to pass a bill to reopen the government.
Fetterman said the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is running out of money and people “need to eat” as the government shutdown dragged into its 21st day …
“This is just bad political theater. Open it up,” he said.
Asked if he would support Republicans “nuking” the filibuster to let a House-passed funding measure pass the Senate with a simple-majority vote, Fetterman replied affirmatively.
More specifically, Fetterman appeared to endorse not a total abolition of the filibuster but a “carve-out” to allow a vote to reopen the government to pass the Senate by a simple majority. And he rationalized that position by noting that Democrats had in the past supported their own carve-outs.
“We ran on that. We ran on killing the filibuster, and now we love it. Carve it out so we can move on. I support it because it makes it more difficult to shut the government down in the future, and that’s where it’s entirely appropriate,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any Democrat clutching their pearls about the filibuster. We all ran on it.”
The filibuster isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, and not all carve-outs are alike. Over the years, Congress has carved out a series of exceptions to the right to filibuster Senate votes, notably executive- and judicial-branch confirmations and congressional budget measures (e.g., the huge “budget reconciliation” bills like this year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act). This year, Senate Republicans also implicitly carved out certain budget scoring rules to make it easier to disguise the deficit-swelling nature of the OBBBA. So the question is not, as Fetterman appears to suggest, whether to have filibuster carve-outs: It’s what the carve-out is for and whom it benefits.
The Democratic carve-out proposal Fetterman is apparently alluding to as something “we ran on” was to exempt voting-rights measures from the filibuster following a series of state voter-suppression measures sponsored by Republican-controlled states and defended by Senate Republicans. Some Democrats (notably Kamala Harris) also backed a carve-out for congressional measures to ensure abortion rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade. In both cases, the proposed carve-outs involved fundamental rights. In the current situation, the right in question is the Senate majority’s power to deny Democrats their one bit of significant leverage over the Trump administration and its congressional allies at a time when Republicans are running the country almost exclusively via executive actions and filibusterproof budget measures (e.g., the OBBBA). The lights really do go out for congressional Democrats if they can’t use this limited power to stand in the way of the Trump 2.0. steamroller.
Fetterman is obviously within his rights to conclude that the cost the country is paying for the government shutdown is too high and to cross the aisle to help the GOP end it. But there’s nothing hypocritical about Democrats wanting to get rid of the filibuster for one thing and not for another; it’s not and never has been an all-or-nothing matter. So Fetterman should probably omit this argument from his litany of grievances about his party.