Power Up: John Fetterman is back, this time with a national profile and anti-Trump voice

HE’S RUNNING: Pennsylvania was ground zero for the 2020 election fight. And it will be again in two years when Democrats attempt to recapture the Senate seat of retiring GOP Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.).

Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who got national attention for his straight shooting criticism of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 80,000-vote defeat in the Keystone State, is running in the open 2022 Senate race. 

Big picture: Toomey is one of three Republican senators who have announced retirements in states where Democrats have a chance to expand their 50-50 Senate majority, including GOP Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.) and Rob Portman (Ohio).

A proponent of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, Fetterman took a shot at moderate Democratic senators who have balked at the wage hike included in Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package, and dismissed Biden flirting with negotiating a longer phase-in for the hike.

• “You’re to the right of Hobby Lobby if you don’t support $15,” Fetterman told Power Up in an interview on Wednesday afternoon. “Hobby Lobby recognized that you got to pay people $15 an hour. So if Hobby Lobby gets it, and you don’t as a Democrat, what’s your problem, you know?” 
• “The government shouldn’t be in the business of subsidizing a business by allowing people to be paid starvation wages,” Fetterman added, calling the issue “one of the great moral debates of our time.” 

The progressive populist, who is 6 foot 8 with several tattoos, cuts a colorful figure as the former mayor of Braddock, Pa. — a predominantly Black, former steel town outside of Pittsburgh. He has cast himself as one of the lead crusaders against Trump who also happens to understand Trump supporters. 

• “I mean, [Trump] has a cult following in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman told us. “And I wouldn’t be surprised that the eventual Republican nominee for Senate is not whoever wins the Trump simp pageant to secure his endorsement in that race.”

Second time’s the charm? Fetterman ran for the Senate four years ago as the long shot against two better known candidates, coming in third behind Joe Sestak and Katie McGinty in the Democratic primary. The 2022 race is already looking a bit different: he’s now got a national profile and a grass roots donor base that contributed over a million dollars in the weeks after he announced a possible Senate run. 

• Fetterman has been “pro-marijuana before it was mainstream; risked impeachment from his mayoral office by officiating a same-sex wedding before it was legal; supports single-payer health care,” our Ben Terris wrote in 2018.

Fetterman seems game to take on Trumpism.  Asked about the blowback Toomey has received since voting to convict  Trump in the Senate impeachment trial, Fetterman congratulated Toomey on finding his spine “ten years too late.”

• “I really don’t care what Patrick J. Toomey says or does because Patrick J. Toomey couldn’t get reelected in Pennsylvania, and that’s why he’s out,” Fetterman added. “So what he does now in the sunset of his career in politics doesn’t matter. Because when it counted, and when it would have really made a difference, you know, he chose the Trump line. I mean, it’s like, congratulations, Pat, you found your spine 10 years too late but way to go.” 
• Fetterman called a local GOP chairman’s critique of Toomey — “we did not send him there to vote his conscience” — a stroke of “accidental wisdom.”
• “That’s their mantra — we didn’t elect you to do the right thing,” Fetterman added. “Whether that is tell the truth about our election results in Pennsylvania, or condemning somebody who has incited violence and riots in our nation’s Capitol.”

Fetterman, who supports ending the filibuster, told Power Up he supports Biden’s approach to bipartisanship with the major caveat it’s “hard to take a party seriously that claimed with a straight face that there was rampant fraud when it was four Trumpers voting with dead relatives for the president out of 7 million ballots.” 

• “[Republicans] never want to concede the fact that actually, this was the smoothest election in the last 30 years in Pennsylvania, truth be told,” Fetterman added.

Earlier this week, Fetterman announced he would not be accepting money from the fossil fuel industry. It’s unclear exactly how he plans to execute his call for the state to make the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy but vowed to protect union workers in the process. 

• “The climate crisis is absolutely real,” said Fetterman told us. “And we need to transition away from a portfolio of fossil fuels — which we currently are — to green renewable energy. And in that transition, we have to honor the men and women, the union workers, that are in this space.”

He doubled down on the defense he issued last week addressing a 2013 incident in which Fetterman used his shotgun to stop and detain an unarmed Black jogger after he claimed to have heard gun shots fired near his home. “The people in Braddock never made an issue about this,” he told us.

• “This was an 80 percent Black community and was never an issue — and they understood the context,” said Fetterman. “They understood the circumstances, and just how pervasive gun violence was. I want to be clear, race played no part in it. At no point was I ever aware of the race of this individual because of how he was dressed. And the people of Braddock, who know me best, who live with me, never made it an issue when they elected me four months later, and then reelected me again, four years later. And I don’t know how else to respond to that core charge when race was never a part of it.”

During his time as lieutenant governor, Fetterman has chaired the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons and pushed for the board to hear more clemency cases. He also “spearheaded the elimination of fees for pardon applications, as a way to lower the barrier for people to clear low-level and drug offenses off their records,” the Appeal’s Joshua Vaughn reported. Fetterman hopes to make criminal justice reform a central plank of his Senate bid: 

• “If you’ve seen the Shawshank Redemption and if you think Morgan Freeman’s character should have died in prison, vote for the other person,” Fetterman told us. “And if you think, and you believe in redemption, and a second chance, you know, I’m your candidate.”

Deemed to have reached “icon” status for his taste in menswear by GQ Magazine — a.k.a. his “enormous collection of regionally-appropriate Carhartt gear” — Fetterman conceded he’ll wear a suit to the Capitol if he must. 

• “If I must be wearing a suit, for whatever reason, I’ll wear a suit,” Fetterman told us. “ … I’m not a rebel without a cause with respect to that. But I’m also not going to pretend that I don’t dress the way I dress and I am who I am either.”
• Paging Donald Trump Jr.: “You’ll never see me dressed up as somebody who’s pretending that I just got finished duck hunting,” he added. “You know? Like, this is who I am. And this is how I dress.”

GOP CIVIL WAR: “Were it up to Trump, Republicans would spend the next two years purging their ranks and reshaping themselves in his own image — a process he moved to jump-start Tuesday with a searing attack on the party’s most powerful elected leader, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.),” our colleagues Mike DeBonis and Josh Dawsey report.

• But McConnell could care less: “The contrast is simple: McConnell doesn’t care about being liked, he cares about winning. Trump cares about being liked; he cares much less about winning,” Steven Law, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, told our colleagues.
• “The clash between the two men stands to define the Republican Party for years to come….10 Republican operatives interviewed Wednesday said the conflict is likely to settle into a cold war, with major battles over the direction of the party.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the No. 3 House Republican. isn’t backing down from her decision to impeach the former president in speaking to Wyoming’s Cheyenne Rotary Club “less than a day after she was censured by Laramie County Republicans for supporting Trump’s impeachment,” the Casper Star Tribune’s Nick Reynolds reports.

• Not mincing words: “I think that it’s very important for us to be clear that we reject some of the most outrageous, extreme and indefensible positions that we’ve seen,” Cheney said. “We’ve seen anti-Semitism, white supremacy [and] Holocaust denial. They have no place in our in our public discourse.”

Don’t miss our deep dive on the impeachment trial: “Until Trump’s acquittal, many on the House impeachment team had been driven by a surprising sense of optimism that they could win over 67 senators — despite all the political evidence to the contrary,” our colleagues Karoun Demirjian and Tom Hamburger report. 

• Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) “wanted a conviction and he believed in the power of the evidence and the law and, of course, in the argument,” Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) told our colleagues.
• House managers reasoned that once Republicans saw the Jan. 6 Capitol riot footage, they would vote to convict.”
• The team considered bringing former vice president Mike Pence or his chief of staff, Marc Short, to testify but “after a number of phone calls Saturday morning, it appeared as though there was little chance that [either] would be a cooperating witness.”

BIDEN, FAUCI BUTT HEADS ON TEACHER VACCINATIONS. “Dr. Anthony S. Fauci said Wednesday that vaccinating all teachers against covid-19 before reopening schools is ‘non-workable,’ wading into an issue that has taken center stage for the Biden administration amid the ongoing pandemic,” Politico’s Ben Leonard reports.

• What he’s saying: “If you are going to say that every single teacher needs to be vaccinated before you get back to school, I believe quite frankly that’s a ‘non-workable situation,’” Fauci told “CBS This Morning.”
• But “top officials have strained to avoid subscribing to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s position that schools can reopen without teachers being vaccinated,” our colleague Aaron Blake reports.
• Why this matters: The White House has “repeatedly avoided endorsing the position of the health officials whose scientific guidance Biden assured the nation would be the North Star of his administration’s coronavirus response.”

FBI CLOSES IN AS DEMOCRATS FLEE CUOMO: “The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn have launched an investigation [into] the actions of New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s coronavirus task force in its handling of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities during the pandemic,” the Albany Times Union’s Brendan J. Lyons reports.

• FYI: “New York Attorney General Letitia James released a report last month accusing [Cuomo’s] administration of undercounting covid-19 deaths in nursing homes by up to 50%,” Axios’s Kadia Goba and Rebecca Falconer report.
• Plot twist: “The climate has shifted dramatically for Cuomo since March, when he emerged as a prominent voice in the health crisis, using his daily briefings to inform and calm a nation of viewers who turned to him as the virus began to spread,” the New York Times’s Jesse McKinley and Luis Ferré-Sadurní report.
• The news comes as “Democratic leaders of the New York State Senate [move] to strip Cuomo of unilateral emergency powers granted during the pandemic, setting up a remarkable rebuke for the governor from members of his own party.”
• A vote could come as soon as next week.

Wait, there’s more: After Democratic state assemblyman Ron Kim of Queens criticized the governor’s role in the growing scandal, he says Cuomo called him and “threatened to destroy [him],” CNN’s MJ Lee and Mark Morales report. 

• Cuomo began with a question: “Are you an honorable man?” the Times reports.
• Then started yelling: “He goes off about how I hadn’t seen his wrath and anger, that he would destroy me and he would go out tomorrow and start telling how bad of a person I am and I would be finished,” Kim said.
• For the record: Three additional Democratic New York lawmakers, who all spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity, said Kim was not “the only lawmaker to have received fierce pushback and threats from Cuomo and his top aides.”
• As new details emerge, Senate Republicans are hanging Judge Merrick Garland’s confirmation as attorney general on the assurance that he will “commit the Department of Justice to fully investigating this coverup.” Read their letter.

RUSH LIMBAUGH DEAD AT 70: “Rush Limbaugh, who deployed comic bombast and relentless bashing of liberals, feminists and environmentalists to become the nation’s most popular radio talk-show host and lead the Republican Party into a politics of anger and obstruction, died [Wednesday after a battle with advanced lung cancer],” our colleague Marc Fisher reports.

 Here’s how his controversial legacy is being covered on the right and left:

• The New York Post: “Limbaugh understood that what drew people to conservatism has less to do with words in musty old books and more to do with the intrinsic beliefs that reside in the hearts of all patriotic Americans. He understood that because he believed it himself,” Ben Domenech wrote.
• The Washington Free Beacon: “The American right has been molded in his anti-elitist, grass roots, demotic, irreverent, patriotic, hard-charging image. Limbaugh is not just a broadcaster. He defines an era,” Matthew Continetti wrote.
• HuffPost: “Limbaugh’s radio career was one long exercise in misogyny, perhaps best summed up by his thesis that ‘feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society,’” Nick Robins-Early and Christopher Mathias wrote.

In a nutshell: “To conservatives, they’ve lost a hero, a titanic figure who made them feel like they had a voice. To liberals, a hate monger is gone. And there is a grain of truth, or more, in both portrayals,” Brian Rosenwald told CNN.

IN MEMORIAM: In honor of the life and legacy of Raskin’s son, Thomas Raskin, who committed suicide on Dec. 31, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted that she’s adopting a “vegetarian diet for Lent” and asked others to join.