Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is facing fresh scrutiny over his job performance and his habit of breaking with fellow Democrats, prompting the Washington insiders at Pod Save America to warn of a worst-case scenario that could result from alienating him too much — one they argue would hand Republicans a gift lasting decades.

Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, won his seat in the 2022 midterms as a strident progressive. Since taking office, however, he has become known for backing more right-wing positions, particularly on support for Israel, an issue toward which the Democratic base has grown increasingly hostile. A new report from the Wall Street Journal this week also exposed messages from Fetterman's staff in which he appears resistant to actually performing the job of a senator.

Across the various messages, Fetterman complained about having to meet with representatives from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, suggesting they simply wanted a free trip to Washington, and said he did not care about the vaccine and Medicaid issues they wished to discuss. He was also caught claiming to be sick to get out of a meeting with paralyzed veterans, only to then appear on Fox News instead.

During a special Saturday video, the former Obama administration staffers at Pod Save America decried these revelations as Fetterman shirking his "basic constituent services."

"You're a senator. Your job is to take meetings with your constituents to help them with problems that they have and to be there for them," said Jon Favreau, Obama's former chief of speechwriting. "You were elected their representative in Washington to represent them. And there's plenty of things you do that are not political in nature or not partisan in nature for your constituents and he's just not doing any of those things."

Favreau, however, also highlighted the many ways Fetterman has remained in line with the Democratic Party despite the frustrations he has caused.

"If you look at his voting record, he still votes — like in 2025, he voted with the Democrats a little over 80 percent of the time on genuinely partisan votes," Favreau explained. "The average Senate Democrat is 92 percent, but even that sort of obscures [things], because some of his breaks were, like, many times on the same issue, which was, like, government funding. But he votes with Democrats most of the time. He's voted against 42 of 46 Trump judges, and he's voted for zero Trump appellate judges... He's not voting like a right-wing lunatic. He's voting almost like a maybe moderate sort of center-left Democrat, and yet all his time is spent going on Fox and s——ing on Democrats."

Favreau also cautioned liberals and Democrats against antagonizing Fetterman in ways that might push him toward switching to the Republican Party, which could have disastrous consequences if he helps decide an "unbelievably important vote." The concern is not purely hypothetical: single senators have flipped chamber control before, as when Vermont's Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party in 2001 and handed Senate control to Democrats, and party switches by individual senators — such as Pennsylvania's own Arlen Specter in 2009 — have repeatedly reshaped the chamber's math.

"I would just tell people to think about it this way," Favreau added. "We get 51 votes [in the midterms], 51 votes in the Senate, we take control of the Senate and then John Fetterman switches and then suddenly there's a Supreme Court vacancy and now we don't have the Senate anymore and we get you know [Samuel] Alito or [Clarence] Thomas or someone else replaced by someone who's 30 [years old] that we're going to deal with for 30 years. It's like, do you think that is worth being really tough on John Fetterman right now, when... 2028 comes around, and he's up [for reelection], yes, let's go all in and elect someone else, but in the next couple years we're stuck with him. There're a lot of people that could be impacted by this who are not John Fetterman."