Senator Feinstein isn’t the only Democratic senator facing questions about their ability to perform essential functions of being a member of Congress’s elite upper chamber. A  new video of Senator Fetterman slurring his words incoherently appears to show that the senator is not fully recovered from his stroke.

Mr. Fetterman’s recent appearance at a Senate hearing has raised questions about his health. It comes after he returned to the chamber following more than a month away at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for clinical depression. 

The Pennsylvania Democrat’s remarks at Tuesday’s Senate banking committee’s hearing on Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse left newspapermen gravely worried about Mr. Fetterman’s health. His remarks began with a garbled critique of bank executives who jetted off to Hawaii after their banks received federal bailouts. 

“So, I went up on the Internet, and it’s like, it did happen. It did happen. It did happen,” Mr. Fetterman said while holding up a copy of the New York Post featuring a front-page article about Silicon Valley Bank’s former chief executive traveling to Hawaii shortly after the crash. “You know, I’ve never been to Hawaii and neither has my family. I guess I’ve never cranked, excuse me, crashed a bank.” 

Mr. Fetterman continued by stuttering a question to Silicon Valley Bank’s former CEO, Greg Becker, about whether bank executives who received bailouts should face work requirements. 

“Republicans want work requirements for SNAP, hungry families…. Shouldn’t you have a working requirement after we [bail out] your bank?” he asked before yielding to the committee’s chairman, Senator Brown of Ohio, after seconds of silence. 

For Democrats, the timing is far from ideal after a wheelchair-bound Mrs. Feinstein, 89, gave an interview to Slate on Tuesday. “I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working,” the coast Democrat told a reporter who asked her about her 10-week absence due to what she said was a case of shingles.

Online commentators quickly took note of how certain outlets, particularly the Washington Post, provided cover to Mr. Fetterman by editing his comments to make them sound more coherent.

Mr. Fetterman’s health has been a subject of concern since May 2022, when he suffered his stroke five months before defeating his Republican challenger, television personality and physician Mehmet Oz. 

The 53-year-old later disclosed that he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, and decreased heart pump in 2017, as reported by CNN. His stroke was later discovered to be ischemic, the result of a vessel that supplies blood to the brain being obstructed. 

A former senator of Pennsylvania, Patrick Toomey, has criticized Mr. Fetterman in the past for his lack of transparency surrounding his health. “He’s either not as well as he claims to be, or he’s afraid to be called out for the radical policies he supports. It’s one or the other,” Mr. Toomey said while campaigning for Dr. Oz. 

Stroke victims are at greater risk of having future strokes, and those who suffer from ischemic stroke risk long-term disability, according to the Yale School of Medicine.