Sen. John Fetterman expects the government to partially shut down — and he's not hedging about it. The Pennsylvania Democrat told Fox News on Sunday that a deal on Department of Homeland Security funding looks increasingly unlikely, with both parties digging in and no clear path to resolution before the deadline.
Fetterman appeared on "Sunday Morning Futures" with Maria Bartiromo and laid the situation out plainly:
"I absolutely would expect that it's going to shut down. I know, we the Democrats, we provided, I think it was 10 kinds of basic things, and then the Republican[s] pushed back quickly, saying that that's like a Christmas wish list and that there are nonstarters."
Senators return to Washington on Monday. Congressional leadership is reportedly considering canceling an upcoming recess to keep negotiations alive. Neither move inspires confidence that a deal is close.
The most revealing part of Fetterman's interview wasn't the shutdown prediction — it was the admission that came next, according to NewsNation:
"I truly don't know what specifically are the Democrats' red lines, that it has to be certainly not going to get all 10. But now, if I had to say now, they would probably expect that there is going to be a shutdown."
A sitting Democratic senator doesn't know what his own party's non-negotiables are. That tells you everything about where the Democratic caucus stands right now: united in opposition, incoherent on substance.
Democrats pushed a list of demands — Fetterman's "10 kinds of basic things" — and Republicans dismissed them as a wish list. Fair enough. But when pressed on which of those ten items Democrats would actually fight for, Fetterman couldn't say. That's not a negotiating posture. That's a party running out the clock and hoping the shutdown itself becomes the message.
This isn't a generic spending dispute. The agencies on the chopping block tell the story: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A DHS shutdown hits immigration enforcement directly — and that's not a coincidence.
Democrats want expansive immigration reforms folded into the funding bill. President Trump's strict immigration agenda, including the ongoing deportation crackdown, has made DHS the political flashpoint of his second term. Two people were shot and killed by federal immigration authorities last month in Minneapolis, and the left has channeled that fury into demands that would effectively tie the department's hands through the appropriations process.
This is the pattern. When Democrats can't win the policy debate on immigration through legislation, they try to win it through the budget. Attach enough conditions to a must-pass spending bill, make the demands broad enough that Republicans reject them, then blame the GOP for the shutdown. It's a strategy as old as the continuing resolution.
Here's the quiet part: Democrats face loud pressure from their base to obstruct the administration's immigration enforcement. A shutdown gives them that obstruction without requiring a single vote on the substance. No Democrat has to go on the record opposing deportations of illegal immigrants. They just have to refuse a clean funding bill and point fingers.
The political math is straightforward. Democrats believe a shutdown damages Republicans because the public associates government dysfunction with the party in power. Republicans believe voters will see through a caucus that can't even articulate its own demands. Both sides are betting the other blinks first.
But the fact that Fetterman went on Fox News to announce the shutdown expectation — rather than to propose a compromise — suggests Democrats have already made their calculation. They'd rather have the shutdown than the deal.
If leadership does cancel the upcoming recess, it signals that negotiations haven't collapsed entirely — just that they're nowhere near done. The agencies affected would continue operating in some capacity during a partial shutdown, but ICE and CBP would face constraints at exactly the moment the administration is pressing its immigration agenda hardest.
That's the leverage Democrats are counting on. And it's the leverage Republicans can't afford to concede.
Fetterman, to his credit, was honest about the trajectory. He just wasn't honest about why. A party that can't identify its own red lines isn't negotiating in good faith. It's waiting for the lights to go out so it can blame the other side for the dark.
