Dear Senator Fetterman:
I’m writing first and foremost so that your staff can increment the “constituent says don’t support Chuck Schumer for Senate Majority Leader” counter. I have little faith that this action will have any effect in the real world. Indeed, I have a mixed record with this genre: in the small hours of October 25, 2001, I posted an open letter to Rick Santorum, then also a senator from Pennsylvania, urging him to oppose the USA PATRIOT Act. The Senate passed it later that day, ninety-eight to one. He was not the one.
A big difference between you and Santorum is that I supported you. Indeed, if memory serves, this was the last thing I posted publicly on Twitter, before it got xombiefied, to the acclaim of two whole likes.
You did let me, and many other former fans of yours in Pennsylvania, down. The reason I’m writing today is not to berate you, or to list all the disappointments, though I will refer to my previous (non-open) letter of March 2025 urging you not to continue funding the Department of Homeland Security. While your reply, much appreciated, highlighted the need to continue funding all government services, I continue to disagree with that choice. Your subsequent vote to support DHS funding after the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis in January of this year deepens my disappointment here. Funding a police force that states in advance its intent to apply state violence arbitrarily, capriciously, and cruelly to immigrants, then murders people seeking to protect their neighbors, has predictable consequences.
I’m writing, as noted, because the correct way for me to express my lack of enthusiasm for Chuck Schumer as Senate Majority Leader is to write my Democratic senator. It is time to send Senator Schumer to eternal tea with the Baileys1. My reasons why are broadly the same as those outlined in my open letter to our common representative in Congress concerning Representative Hakeem Jeffries, should you or your staff wish to review them. This election was first and foremost about reestablishing the rule of law, which is the only issue on which I see immediate broad consensus as to the form of the remedy to apply. Your record does not inspire me with much confidence that we see eye-to-eye on this.
While we’re here, though: in September, CBS quoted you on the subject of your future: “Let’s revisit after the midterm”, and “Let’s see what happens if I happen to be 51”. So, let’s revisit. By my tally as of this writing you’re 54, at least, meaning the Senate Democratic conference will need seven Republicans without you to break a filibuster, or fourteen to convict in any impeachment trial. Not great, not terrible, but any honest assessment of the calculus means that for the next two years you’re charged with doing a job you don’t appear, at least from public sources, to like all that much, with significantly reduced leverage, and “no path as a Republican” in your own words2. Given that: Pennsylvania needs a senator who will represent it in the hard work, now and beyond, of reestablishing the rule of law in the United States of America. I’d honestly prefer it if you could be that senator. If you can’t, though, please consider joining Senator Schumer for tea with the Baileys, and let Governor Shapiro appoint someone who is willing and able to be.
Sincerely,
Brian Trammell
P.S. Please remove me from the Fetterletter list (contact details redacted from the open letter version).
(1): Joe and Eileen Bailey of Massapequa, the imaginary middle-class couple Schumer introduced in his 2007 book Positively American and has gone on consulting ever since. John Oliver counted 265 mentions of them in 264 pages. This is also the man who predicted in 2016 that every blue-collar Democrat lost in western Pennsylvania would be made up for by two moderate Republicans in the Philadelphia suburbs (some tellings have it two or three), about which you, of all people, will have views.
(2): I think this is broadly correct, and while I may be disappointed in you from a policy perspective, I still consider you a deeply thoughtful man, so I cannot in any universe imagine you pulling a Haley Stevens.
As with my letter to Representative Lee, Claude (Opus) did the research. The words, and the disappointment, are my own.