Fetterman and Oz debate: Pennsylvania Senate candidates talk economy, abortion

If it wasn’t clear that the U.S. electoral system is still not accessible to people with disabilities, tonight was proof. While disabled people have a desire to run, they remain one of the most underrepresented populations in both state and federal government.

The pace and setting of a traditional debate like the one we witnessed in Pennsylvania tonight, even with closed captioning, was just not favorable to a candidate who has any kind of processing difficulties.

If we want to see more lawmakers with disabilities, we need to rethink the way we elect them. That means reimagining what a campaign looks like and even how a candidate should sound. No matter who ends up in the Senate, this race should be a learning opportunity for us to reflect on these pivotal questions of inclusivity and who gets to participate in democracy.

Oz spent a lot of time throwing ableist digs at Fetterman. I wish auditory processing disorder had been clearly defined early on in the debate. Most people don’t understand what that means. It means that your brain doesn’t hear sounds in the same way. It doesn’t mean that the person can’t understand language; that’s why captioning works.

The ADA has been the law of the land for 32 years and captions are a reasonable accommodation for not only auditory processing disorder, but also for people who are hard of hearing and deaf. But captions also mean that there is a delay in answering. The fact that Fetterman was able to read the question and then answer in a reasonable amount of time, shows that accommodations do work and he, like most disabled people, have to work twice as hard for the same outcomes.

Too often political debates like tonight’s are more about just the act of saying you held a debate than actually trying to get useful information out of the candidates. That’s definitely how I felt during last week’s matchup in Georgia’s Senate race. But tonight? Tonight my faith in the format was restored just a little.

Meredith has already written about how good the moderation was from WPXI’s Lisa Sylvester and ABC 27’s Dennis Owens. And we’ve touched on the impressive captioning efforts that were required to allow Fetterman to participate. But I think we also need to highlight the research and care that the production team put into the questions put before Oz and Fetterman. When Oz was asked straight up “would you have voted for the gun control bill” that Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican, helped draft, I was floored. Same for the specificity of asking Fetterman whether there were any limits on abortion that he would support.

These were questions that were designed to yield specific answers, not open-ended ramblings or stock responses. Yes, debates like tonight’s almost always have journalists as moderators — but it’s been a long time since I’ve watched a debate that felt so much like an act of journalism.

Seeing as this debate was held in Pennsylvania, the moderators saved the most important question for last: Do you support the Pittsburgh Steelers or Philadelphia Eagles? This is a state that takes its NFL fandoms very seriously, after all. (Editor’s note: My dad is from Philadelphia and I am a diehard Eagles fan. Go Birds! The only undefeated team in football!)  

Fetterman, who was the mayor of a Pittsburgh suburb for over a decade, obviously threw his support behind the Black and Gold. Oz chose the Eagles, and even sang a few bars of the team’s fight song for dramatic effect. It remains to be seen whether Philadelphia’s famously loyal (and cynical) Eagles fans are buying it.

Asked whether he would support the expansion of the Supreme Court, Fetterman said that he wouldn’t, bucking what’s become a progressive call-to-arms as the court has swung hard right. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the Supreme Court has to be nine justices, and the size has shifted over the centuries before landing on the current makeup. Fetterman said that though he does not agree with the current court’s decisions, he would not want to “change the rules” to add more liberals.

Oz, unsurprisingly, said that he also would not be in favor of expanding the court, but used the question to attack Fetterman’s pledge to reform the filibuster in the Senate. But any move to “bust the filibuster” is “not a dangerously radical move,” as Oz put it. I’m just going to let you go ahead and read some of the (many, many) arguments against the filibuster I’ve made in the last two years rather than explaining here.

Oz bashed Fetterman for not being able to debate him in the immediate aftermath of his stroke, omitting the fact that Fetterman's health would not permit it.

Despite Fetterman showing up and working twice as hard to process the question with captions, Oz went on to dismiss his opponent’s ability to understand him. In a rebuttal to Fetterman’s point on education policy, Oz said, “Obviously I wasn’t clear enough for you to understand this.”

Fetterman landed a great zinger on the GOP’s cruel immigration stunt: “I don’t ever recall in the Statue of Liberty did they say, you know, ‘Take our tired huddled masses and put them on a bus and use cheap political stunts about them.’ I believe we have to develop a comprehensive and bipartisan solution for immigration.”

Fetterman’s reference to stunts by Republican pols like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sending asylum-seeking migrants to Martha’s Vineyard underscores how the GOP has taken a turn toward the sadistic on immigration activism — and frames it as anti-American.

The candidates were asked what the greatest foreign threat the U.S. faces is. Fetterman gave what has become a fairly stock answer — “China” — while Oz said the biggest threat is actually America not projecting strength. And in support of that claim, he brought up … the Iran nuclear deal, which the Trump administration withdrew from in 2018. 

Oz claimed that the deal was made in the pursuit of buying oil from Iran — while leaving Iran with the ability to detonate a nuclear weapon — instead of supporting American energy independence. There are like 12 things wrong with that, not least of which being that there was nothing in the 2015 deal with Iran and other world powers that would have let the U.S. buy Iranian oil. It also wouldn’t have allowed Iran to enrich uranium enough to produce a nuclear weapon, but honestly I’m still stuck on the oil thing.

The most generous explanation I can come up with is that more Iranian oil on the market would bring down global oil prices, but I really can’t tell if that’s what he meant.

Oz says his goal if elected will be to unite, not divide. But he also says he will support whichever presidential candidate the GOP puts up in 2024, including former President Donald Trump. When asked what he thinks about Trump’s mounting and ongoing legal battles, Oz said he hadn’t been following them “closely” but was confident they’d “work themselves out.”