“I’m not a progressive, I’m just a regular Democrat,” tweeted the oft-ridiculed Pennsylvania Senator, John Fetterman, on Monday. The message marked the latest move by the freshman Democrat, which has drawn the ire of his more radical-left colleagues. In his thus far brief tenure in the U.S. Senate, Fetterman has carved out niche as a man willing to buck both his own party’s leadership and its bully-tactic radical left flank. All-in-all, he might best be described as an extremely rare, ‘America First’ Democrat.
Despite suffering a stroke which left him with speech difficulties and trouble processing audio, Fetterman was able to narrowly defeat Republican candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat after the retirement of Pat Toomey. A long and arduous recovery process sidelined Fetterman for much of the first year-and-a-half of his tenure in the U.S. Senate. Now, however, he’s looking like a better Senator for ordinary PA residents than Oz would’ve been.
CONSISTENCY AGAINST CORRUPTION.
Fetterman – who is unlikely to appreciate compliments from The National Pulse – has emerged as a vocal critic of his party’s free-for-all policies at the U.S. southern border, and has even been the most dogged voice calling for the resignation of his colleague Senato Bob Menendez (D-NJ). Menendez was recently indicted by a federal grand jury over allegations of public corruption, bribery, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the Egyptian government.
“Senator Menendez needs to go, and if you are going to expel Santos, how can you allow somebody like Menendez to remain in the Senate?” pressed Fetterman after now former-Rep. George Santos (R-NY) was expelled from the House of Representatives over allegations of violating federal campaign finance law. “He has the right for his day in court and all that but he doesn’t have the right to have those kinds of votes and things that — that’s not a right. And I think we need to make that kind of decision to send him out.”
ACKNOWLEDGING BIDEN’S BORDER CRISIS.
On immigration, Fetterman has pointedly noted that Democrats “have to effectively address it as well.” Progressives in the Democrat ranks have balked at Republican calls to beef up funding for border security and restrict the President’s authority to grant blanket asylum.
“It’s a reasonable conversation — until somebody can say there’s an explanation on what we can do when 270,000 people are being encountered on the border, not including the ones, of course, that we don’t know about,” Fetterman said in an interview last week. He added that while he doesn’t agree with combining border security with the Ukraine funding supplemental, the conversation “[is] still one that we should have.”
U.S. STEEL.
Now Sen. Fetterman is joining with America First Republicans like Sens. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) in blasting the purchase of the United States Steel Corporation (US Steel) by Japan’s Nippon Steel Corporation. All three Senators point to the potential national security concerns posed by the deal, along with the threat to American jobs and industrial production. Sens. Vance and Hawley are asking Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to bring the deal for review before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which she chairs. Sen. Fetterman has promised he will do “everything he can” to block the deal.
“Steel is always about security – both our national security and the economic security of our steel communities. I am committed to doing anything I can do, using my platform and my position, to block this foreign sale,” Fetterman said in a statement, adding: “This is yet another example of hard-working Americans being blindsided by greedy corporations willing to sell out their communities to serve their shareholders. I stand with the men and women of the Steelworkers and their union way of life. We cannot allow them to be screwed over or left behind.”
With voter concerns about immigration, trade, and the economy dominating much of the discussion heading in to the 2024 presidential election, it remains to be seen how Fetterman will balance his populist politics with the interests of the Democrat Party and President Joe Biden. But for now, the Pennsylvania Democrat is sounding more friend than foe to the America First philosophy.
