I’m officially married, too, but the streets is my first wife, big dog. The streets is my first wife. I don’t know why y’all keep asking me the same question over and over again. Bro, the game is the game. Talk to him, Derek. I’m married to the game, baby. The game is always going to be the game. Now, you can sit here and fight it if you want to. I choose not to fight it. Why such a good move today? I don’t know. All right. Now, let’s go over to Fetterman and see what’s happening on the Democrats side, all right? How is this going to end? Are there any new signs this week that one of the political parties might blink? Joining us now is Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.

He’s one of three Senate Democrats who has been voting with Republicans to continue to fund the government. Senator, thanks for joining us. So, as you know, 42 million Americans, including 2 million Pennsylvanians, will not receive food stamp or SNAP benefits this month because funding officially lapsed yesterday. The White House says this is the fault of Democrats for shutting down the government. Democrats note that the Trump administration is not dipping into the contingency funds for SNAP, and they think that Trump is doing that to pressure Democrats. How do you see it? Who do you blame for this? Well, I mean, for me, fundamentally, I’m deeply, deeply distressing to know that 42 million Americans are going to lose their SNAP benefits, and now that’s one of the big reasons why I refuse to shutting our government down.

And again, I feel like the Democrats really need to own the shutdown. I mean, we’re shutting it down. I know why they claim because they want to address the tax credits, and I fully support that. I voted for all of their CRs, RCRs, every single time, and I refuse to put 42 million Americans in the kinds of food insecurity. Now, this is all solved by just reopening our government, and the people are now paid. Now, if we are the party that are fighting for working people, now, as far as I’m aware, every single union that’s involved in this now is now demanding to us to reopen that.

That’s the side that I’m in through this, and now the four airlines are now saying, we really have to stop this right now, and why do we really want to make flying less safe by forcing this kind of situation and making things that much stressed? So it’s not something I support of, and I don’t want to be involved, and now we can find a way forward. We need to find a way forward, and I do believe we can achieve these kinds of tax credits, and this is something I support, but it’s the wrong tactic.

It was wrong when the Republicans did it. It’s wrong now that we seem to be driving it. Tom Fetterman is probably the only reasonable Democrat that I see right now, and he’s been being reasonable for a long time now. John Fetterman is actually a throwback Democrat. He a Democrat from the 90s. He’s not even supposed to be at his generation. I know his party ain’t him, because he break code every time that he get an opportunity. He probably don’t even listen to nothing that they say. They’d probably be like, all right, guys, let’s huddle up together and get our talking points and our game plan, and John Fetterman be like, man, I’m not listening to these people.

I’m about to go over here and be objective and do what I do and think what I think, and I’m going to be reasonable, and I don’t see anything wrong with it. I don’t know why everybody got to be so extreme. I don’t know why everybody got to be extreme. It’s a very simple premise. Open the government, allow for people to get paid, and then negotiate further for what you want the government to looks like as far as what you want, where you want the money allocated. But everybody got to get paid.

Everybody got to get, listen, imagine this, imagine this, because this is the only place that this happens, right? Imagine you work at a company, or you own a company, right? Imagine you own a company and payday roll around, because see, the first thing that I do in payday roll around is I pay everybody. At the very top of my list, hey, payroll, then pay this person, pay the contractor. I just got a text message today. Rita called me this morning because she on her way out of town hanging out and stuff like that, having a good time.

Don’t worry about it. We don’t have the same problems from the shutdown. We not on government assistance, so we can go where we want to go when we want to go. She sent me a text message this morning and said, hey, they’re going to be done with the Saturday or Thursday, and you got to send out $20,000. And I was complaining, hey, listen, they’ll be done with the Saturday, Wednesday or Thursday, we owe $20,000 more. And I said, cool. What was the total cost? Seems close to $40,000. She said, yep. And I said, not sure why I was expecting to be close to be $20,000 to $25,000.

And then she says they had to replace a lot of the wood. And then I said, are they breaking ground this week on the next property? She said they had to replace a lot of that wood. Cool. It is what it is. We hire American workers. We pay the product. I complain. Oh, my God, that’s not in the budget. I thought it was going to be close to 2025. Nope. It’s going to be close to 40, and you owe $19,000 more once they get done. All right, whatever. All right. I’m sitting there complaining, throwing pissy fits, angry, upset, and writing checks.

Imagine you own companies, or you are the client and you refuse to pay the people that do the work. Imagine people come to work every day and do their job. Imagine everybody come to work every day and do their job. And you say, you know what? I’m going to keep paying me. I’m going to go out of town. I’m going to still use the dollars of the company. And I’m going to get rich, but I’m not going to honor my agreement to make sure that you guys are paid to. Do you know what kind of chaos that they will be able to do? You know what kind of chaos that would be? Or I’ll tell them, hey, y’all keep working until I decide that I can get paid, and I got the money, but I’m going to just keep working for the next two months, and then I’m going to give you back pay.

And listen, if you got to go to the food pantry, you got to do whatever you got to do, go and take care of it. I’m going to take care of that. That’s essentially what you see happening with our federal government. They paying themselves our tax money that they’re supposed to be working for us as public servants, and they telling everybody else, y’all niggas got to keep working until we decide that we want to open up the federal government, that we can open up tomorrow if we wanted to. Senators say that bipartisan talks to end this log jam seem to be gaining steam, though, and an actual agreement is out of reach as of now.

Do you know where these bipartisan talks to end the shutdown are? We’re on day 33 of the shutdown, obviously. Crazy. I sure hope so. I mean, this is an absolute fail. It’s actually embarrassing, honestly. If we can’t even kind of keep the lights on like this, and now reminding everybody, federal workers have had to borrow more than a third of a billion dollars just to pay their bills. I mean, those are the kinds of workers that make this, and they’re really suffering now too. And now people now can’t count on their SNAP benefits, and now also WIC and Head Start.

These are the kinds of people, why I’m a Democrat, fighting for people that just like that. Now, I’m not seems like removing against our core values to keep our government shut down at this point as now we’re approaching now 33 days now. Yeah. So let’s talk about the issue that Democrats say they’re fighting for in the shutdown. Pennsylvania’s Obamacare Marketplace says more than 150,000 Pennsylvanians are going to lose their coverage if these enhanced premiums expire at the end of the year. In Allegheny County, where you live, average monthly health care costs are projected to rise 75%.

In rural Juniata County, those prices are going to jump a staggering 435%. Have any Republicans offered you any assurances that they will work with Democrats to actually do something to prevent this from happening if Democrats reopen the government? Yeah, well, I absolutely do believe because a lot of those counties that you just referenced now, they’re all very, very red. And then I do believe many Democrats now realize, and now Republicans realize that we have to address this and extend these tax credits. And I absolutely hope that we do. This is what I’m saying, like I fully, fully support these things, but this is the wrong tactic.

And right now, by doing this, our government shut down. We’re getting neither of those things, and they guarantee neither you’re going to get your SNAP benefits and you’re not going to get this kind of tax credits that we all need. Reopen this thing and we can find a way forward. That’s the way democracy operates for right now. There are big elections on Tuesday, obviously coast to coast in New Jersey and Virginia and California. There’s a referendum on redistricting. In New York City, polls show that the Democratic nominee, Zoran Mamdani, is in the lead for the mayor’s race.

You’ve previously dismissed him as, quote, not even a Democrat. And it is true, he’s a Democratic socialist. Do you think it would be a mistake for New Yorkers to elect him as mayor? Would you vote for Cuomo if you were a New Yorker or Sliwa? No, that’s going to be New York’s voice. Socialism is not the future of my party. And if that’s going to be their future, that’s really up to New York City to decide those things. We all know how socialism works out. Ask anybody that’s lived under those kinds of systems all across the globe.

But for me, as a Democrat, as a committed Democrat, I might disagree in some areas, much like shutting down our government or other areas now. But for me, as a committed Democrat, I am going to push back and announce people that this is wrong. And now we are hurting the very people that we fight for. And now we’re getting nothing for them if we continue to keep our government shut down. Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman, thank you so much for joining us. He’s the only person that’s reasonable. I mean, he’s the only Democrat as willing to stand up against socialism.

You see what’s happening over in New York, and you see how everything is playing out there. And he’s saying, listen, I’m a Democrat, not a socialist. [tr:trw].

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