Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Democrats should follow the lead of Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who has openly supported some of the GOP rhetoric on immigration.
“Listen to Fetterman. I mean, Fetterman should be the leader of the Democratic Party if they ever want to win the majority again,” McCarthy said Thursday evening in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham.
His comments came a day after the House passed Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R-S.C.) bill supporting the deportation of illegal immigrants convicted of sex crimes or domestic violence. More than 60 Democrats voted in favor of the measure but as a collective, McCarthy said the party is still “out of touch.”
The California Republican, who retired from Congress in 2023 after being ousted as Speaker, criticized those who spoke out against the bill.
“I would expect the Democrats to talk like this a year ago, before the election. Have they not heard what the voters have said?” he continued. “Remember, this isn’t throw everyone out who came here illegally who broke the law… You have to sexually assault somebody, and they still want to protect [them].”
Despite the pushback, the House earlier this month passed legislation named after the slain Georgia student Laken Riley that would require detention of migrants arrested for theft. The bill, set to be voted on in the Senate Friday, honors the woman killed by a Venezuelan migrant who was arrested for shoplifting ahead of the attack and paroled in the U.S.
Fetterman has recently spoken in favor of deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes.
“If you’re here illegally and you’re committing crimes and those things, I don’t know why anybody thinks that it’s controversial that they all need to go,” Fetterman said in a separate Fox News interview.
He said Democrats who don’t support similar approaches to immigration were “the reason why we lost.”
The Pennsylvania senator has been seemingly warm to President-elect Trump’s Cabinet picks, suggesting he could support the confirmations of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as secretary of state, Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary and Kash Patel to lead the FBI.
Fetterman recently met with Trump, who has threatened mass deportations for illegal immigrants, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, a meeting the president-elect called “fascinating.”
