The progressive left has been displeased with Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman since October, when he emerged as one of the national scene’s most vocal, least conflicted supporters—from either party—of Israel’s war in Gaza. Now he’s taken an equally confrontational position on immigration, joining the ongoing discussions about a potential border security bill in the Senate by admonishing liberals to concede that conditions at the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico constitute a crisis.

“I hope Democrats can understand that it isn’t xenophobic to be concerned about the border,” Fetterman told Politico in early December, describing the monthly number of so-called encounters between undocumented migrants and U.S. enforcement agents as “astonishing” and not “a Fox News kind of statistic.” (That number, for the most recent month available, was 242,000. Annually, encounters have more than doubled from pre-pandemic levels.) A week later he told NBC News, in response to questions about both Israel and immigration, that he’s “not a progressive”—a declaration which came as a surprise to those who remembered him repeatedly describing himself as one while he was running for office in Pennsylvania.

The question this raises—and that NBC News raised, explicitly, in the headline of its report—is whether Fetterman is becoming a “maverick,” that fabled creature of Senate myth, a horse with John McCain’s body and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s head, one which votes by the light of its own convictions rather than the stifling dictates of left–right ideology. Political reporters like mavericks because wild-card voting patterns make for exciting news cycles, and pundits like them because they keep the dream of a moderate-voter uprising alive. There are attention-based rewards available, in other words, for those who take this path, and Fetterman does already have an iconoclastic manner of dress.

The existence of another Sinema would be alarming to both progressives and mainstream, party-line Democrats. She nearly derailed Joe Biden’s first term by helping kill the social spending provisions in his “Build Back Better” proposal, and her support for preserving the filibuster precluded the possibility of passing laws that would protect voting rights and abortion access. With a narrow Senate majority that is likely to stay small next year if it doesn’t........

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