On Friday’s broadcast of C-SPAN’s “Ceasefire,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) said that things would be ridiculously chaotic if the government was still shut down and stated that Democrats “were afraid of parts of our base.”
Fetterman said, “[C]an you imagine if it was kept shut down through Thanksgiving and right now? Can you imagine the chaos? And it took eight Democrats with the courage to say, because my entire — the entire base [was] demanding and that –. And they just turned it into, like, a game thing. And I’m like — it’s like, people haven’t –.”
Host Dasha Burns then cut in to ask, “When you say they turned into a game, are you talking Democrats, Republicans, both?”
Fetterman responded, “What I’m saying, it’s like, this was a demand by — and people were afraid of parts of our base. And I’m like, we were always the party that refused to shut our government down. After what we ended up with, it was a vote, and [I’m] pretty confident we could have gotten that same vote without shutting it down at this point. And, for me, it’s like, 42 million Americans on SNAP, those are the kind of people, as a Democrat, you fight for. And I definitely could never vote to put those folks at risk…and then not paying our military and other ones, we have to find a way forward, rather than shutting it down. And now flying [gets] less and less safe and the kinds of delays and more chaos, like, that was a betrayal of our core responsibility.”
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