Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) slammed his fellow Pennsylvania Democratic colleague Sen. John Fetterman on Thursday, calling him a “lazy trust fund baby" following reports that Fetterman has been neglecting his duties as a senator.
Page A2From§Eachthe supper edition — 4 September 2026
Pennsylvania Democrats agree the party has a problem: each other.
As it ran on the front
I spent Tuesday on the phone with my E-ZPass account, because a letter came saying I owe forty-one dollars to a violation department I've never dealt with, and every person I reached worked a different desk than the last one. Collections said try violations. Violations said try billing. Billing said that's a state contract, call the turnpike commission direct. I wrote their extension on the back of a gas receipt in the glovebox, next to four numbers that didn't work either, and somewhere around the fifth transfer it occurred to me I'd read the same runaround this week about a United States Senator.
Did you see what Congressman Boyle called Senator Fetterman? He put it on X: John Fetterman is a disgrace. Called him a lazy trust fund baby. Said — I'm reading this off what ran in The Hill — our state deserves better than a, and the post just stops there, mid-sentence. I don't know what came after the dash. Does anybody?…
…(cont) Then there's Congressman Deluzio, from the other end of the state, who told The Lever it's gotten bad enough he's thinking about running against his own party's senator in 2028. He didn't say lazy. He said a failure of leadership. Is a failure of leadership the same complaint as lazy? I was a shop steward for eleven years. Those are two different write-ups where I come from — one's a discipline problem, one's a performance review — and you don't usually get both from two separate offices over the same man in the same week.
And a week before either of them, Fetterman told The Hill the real problem in the party isn't him at all — it's socialism. He named a Senate nominee in Michigan and a man who dropped out of the Maine race as his evidence. Same article mentioned he now polls better among Pennsylvania Republicans than he does among Pennsylvania Democrats. I'm not bringing that up to make a point. It was just in the same piece.
By the time I got to the toll plaza that afternoon, still on hold, phone propped on the dash next to the dog, I had three different diagnoses of one senator and three tollbooths ahead of me, all open. First booth: E-ZPass lane's down, use cash. Second booth: no, cash lane's down, go electronic. Third fella just waved everybody through. Three people, forty feet apart, running the same plaza, and not one of them will tell you which lane is actually broken.
That's about where I left it with the senator's own colleagues. One says lazy. One says failure of leadership, bad enough to run a primary over. The man himself says socialism, and points at two other people's campaigns to prove it. Three departments, three diagnoses, and not one of them is describing the same problem as either of the other two.
I paid the cash lane, since that fellow waved me through, and started for the exit, and a state trooper doing a routine check tapped my window. Before you pull out, sir — you know your registration sticker's expired? I did not know that. Nobody had mentioned it. Not the tollbooth. Not collections, billing, or violations. Not the Congressman from Philadelphia or the one from Pittsburgh. Certainly not the senator. Whose department handles that one, would you say?
“You got a congressman calling the senator lazy, another one calling him a failure of leadership, and the senator himself blaming socialism, and not one of the three of them mentions who's actually cashing a paycheck while nobody's covering the shift. That's not a debate about the party, that's three separate excuse notes for the same absence. They can't agree on the diagnosis because agreeing on the diagnosis means somebody has to write the prescription, and prescriptions cost money, and none of them have volunteered to be the one who pays for it.”
“Look, three different Democrats saying three different things about their own senator in one week — that's not dysfunction, that's a healthy, robust exchange of— okay, one says he's a disgrace, one's threatening to primary him in 2028, and he's out there blaming socialism for his own approval numbers, so, fine, you're right, that's not a robust exchange of ideas, that's the building coming down and everybody filming it on their own phone.”
The receipts
Deluzio, a populist Democratic PA congressman, told The Lever it’s gotten so bad he might try to primary his state’s senior senator in 2028.
· Fetterman: Democratic Party has 'socialism problem' from the morgue, 28 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.