Senator John Fetterman is pushing back reports of unwilling to serve in Congress.
In a discussion with Senator Dave McCormick (R-PA.) on Monday morning, Fetterman argued that the media was trying to “fill” him up for the lack of public appearances, including polls for Congress.
“I’m here. I’m doing that,” Fetterman (D-Pa.) said. “For me, if I missed some of those quotes – I mean some of those votes – I made 90% of them, and we all know that the votes I missed are Mondays. They are travel days and I’m three young children.
Fetterman and McCormick spoke in Boston on the Senate Project, a series to cultivate bipartisanship that aired on Fox Nation.
Fetterman’s office did not immediately respond to Politico’s request for comment.
The first term of the Senator was fired from progressives and others both in Congress and in his hometown on suspicion of an explosion against his voting records and staff.
Fetterman suffered a stroke just before winning the 2022 Senate primary and was admitted to a hospital where doctors removed the blood clots. In February 2023, Fetterman announced that he was seeking treatment for severe depression.
Many praised Fetterman for being open about his mental health struggle.
However, this month’s Bombshell New York Magazine report claims that current and former staff are concerned about Fetterman’s mental and physical health. Top Democrats have not yet come to Fetterman’s defense, with at least one progressive Pennsylvania organisation calling for Fetterman to resign, citing the senator’s voting record and “da-crime attitudes” towards his constituents.
“By avoiding contact with members who cannot even leave voicemail after opening hours, refusing to keep city hall, screaming at visitors to your office, and refusing to lose more votes than the rest of the Senate today, you have failed to fulfill your most basic duties of the office.”
On Monday, Fetterman alleged that Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) missed more votes than he did.
Sanders did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Murray spokesman told Politico that the majority of her ballots in which she was absent took place during the vote that took place when her husband was hospitalized.
“Senator Murray was looking after her husband while he was in the hospital and was ready to go back to the floor if the vote might have been decisive,” the spokesman said in a statement.
“Why aren’t the media on the left screaming and demanding and claiming that they’re not doing their job?” Fetterman said.
Since taking office in 1991, Sanders has missed 836 votes (about 13.4%) of 6,226 roll-call votes, according to Govtrack.us, a government transparency site. Between 1993 and May 2025, Murray missed 290 of the 11,106 roll-call votes, or about 2.6%.
According to Govtrack.us, Fetterman missed 174, or about 18.1 percent of the 961 roll call votes in his first semester. The current median lifetime record for senators is 2.9%.
