QUESTION ASKED: Does John Fetterman Really Want to Be a Senator?
Fetterman doesn’t want to be judged by his wardrobe. Okay. Let’s look at his record since joining the Senate.
So far in his Senate career, Fetterman has missed 33.4 percent of the Senate votes. He is the chamber’s second-most absent member, behind Dianne Feinstein of California, who has missed 46.3 percent of the votes this session. Much of Fetterman’s absence was during his six-week stay at Walter Reed Medical Center in treatment for clinical depression — he missed 85 percent of the votes in February and March. But not all of it was from that time period; Fetterman also missed 13 percent of the votes from July to September.
On July 19, he missed a vote to require the president to consult Congress before withdrawing from NATO. On July 11, he missed a confirmation vote on Xochitl Torres Small to be deputy secretary of Agriculture. And two days later, he missed confirmation votes for Kalpana Kotagal to be a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and David M. Uhlmann to be assistant administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Confirmation votes like those are not the most exciting, dramatic, or consequential tasks of a senator, but they are part of the job. I would have figured that a guy who missed so many votes out of the gate would have tried to avoid missing many more for the rest of the session. The U.S. Senate has a lot of “state work periods” in which lawmakers aren’t in session, and the chamber rarely holds floor votes before Monday night or after Thursday evening. It’s not like Fetterman has the commuting challenges of senators from Hawaii, Alaska, or the West Coast.
In that New York Times interview in July, Fetterman did not sound like he was enjoying his new life as a senator. He told the paper that he thinks the Senate has “a fixation on a lot of dumb s***. Bad performance art is really what it gets down to.”
Exit quote: “Put Fetterman in a suit, where he can’t show off the arm tattoos, and he’s just a really tall, really big, bald senator.”
In accordance with the prophecy: Fetterman Prepares For Senate Job With New Dress Hoodie.