This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., is urging Republicans to "nuke the filibuster" in order to prevent future government shutdowns.

The Democrat who often speaks against the leadership of his party appeared on Fox News Saturday, telling anchor Kayleigh McEnany the Senate should slice out an exception to the current filibuster rule regarding government funding, making it "almost impossible" to halt operations.

"Well, I just know that two things must be true in this situation right now," Fetterman said.

"SNAP depends on 2 million Pennsylvanians to feed themselves, and I believe it's about 40 million Americans across the nation. That's a big deal right now."

And now we all realize that a lot of the premiums are going to go up, and we might want to address that too. We can support those two things, but I think it's fundamentally wrong, regardless, to shut our government down for those things. The Republican side has their priorities; we have our priorities. I think we have to agree that our government must be open."

McEnany asked the senator: "You think it's time for Republicans to nuke the filibuster and end this thing?"

Fetterman responded: "I think I broached that before. I think it's entirely appropriate. I would remind all of us – the Democrats – we wanted to nuke the entire filibuster. I'm referring to right now carving out this specific situation. I'm not talking about eliminating the entire filibuster.

"It's really not much different than about the en bloc nominees, and I think that was appropriate to do in that situation as well, too. Carving out the filibuster now would make it almost impossible to shut our government down in the future, regardless if it's the Democrats or the Republicans doing these things. We should remove our own power to shut this down in this way."