Chris Murphy
The American people didn't send us to Congress to post our sympathies on social media. You can do that without going through the trouble of getting elected to Congress. This job is about setting rules that better protect us and our children.Collection: Sympathy
People are working hard, they're doing everything we ask of them, and they are still struggling. It's not enough to just have a job. We need to make sure that these are good-paying jobs that pay the rent and put food on the table. Jobs that have benefits like health care and that allow people to save for retirement.Collection: Health
American values come by helping countries fight corruption to build stability. American values flow through tackling climate change and building energy independence. American values come through humanitarian assistance whereby we try to stop catastrophes from happening.Collection: Independence
American foreign policy needs to be driven by what will get results and what is legal, not by what satisfies our primal instincts of revenge.Collection: Legal
Participatory democracies. Open economies. Web-based communication. All American innovations to the great conundrums of the globe.Collection: Communication
Social media is such a key organizing and communication tool, and I've made a major commitment to use it as a way to make the legislative process as transparent as possible.Collection: Communication
I have gone from a proponent of campaign finance reform to a revolutionary during my time in public service.Collection: Finance
Sympathy is important, but it rings hollow if not followed by action.Collection: Sympathy
With every new class of representatives that comes to Congress, there is a greater recognition of the perils of private financing of campaigns. I believe that by pulling back the curtain on the daily pressures faced by members of Congress, we can show the public how critical this reform is to the salvation of our democracy.
Rarely do political contributions lead to direct quid pro quo transactions - donations for votes - and those that cross this line normally get caught.
Most elected officials don't want you to know about the world of political fundraising because they fear that it paints an unflattering portrait of public life.
The more we remove the need for individual members of Congress to raise private election funds, the more our representatives can focus on the things they were elected to do, and the more time they will have to cross party lines and erase the divisions that pollute our national dialogue.
The NRA has become financially dependent on more and more guns being sold - especially the expensive ones. In turn, the NRA has stated that its top legislative priority is to protect gun makers by advocating for legislation that benefits them.
Washington is agonizingly slow at learning from its mistakes. Especially in the Middle East.
I'm generally pretty responsible and diligent, but people make mistakes.
I ran in 2006 as an opponent of the Iraq War, and I came to Congress to change overreliance on U.S. military power.
Yemen is a symbol of our continued military hubris in the Middle East - an addiction Obama was supposed to cure but didn't.
I can't throw a nickel from the Capitol without hitting a think tank that's been financed by one of the Gulf States.
Russia's number-one goal is to pull apart the E.U., to pull apart NATO.
I play in the congressional baseball game.
I used to play lots of sports. I used to be a good tennis player. I used to be a decent golfer.
I grew up in a pretty economically safe, physically safe household, and, you know, now my life is defined by other people's trauma and by other people's emotional experience with it, and I think I'm richer for that, frankly.
In Connecticut, we have passed some of the strongest anti-gun-violence laws in the nation. We don't restrict anybody's Second Amendment rights.
What we do in Connecticut is ban assault weapons. We ban high-capacity magazines. We have true universal background checks, and we require everybody to get a permit from their police department before they can carry a pistol.
Background checks applied universally and nationally would take millions of illegal guns off the streets of our cities.
I would respectfully disagree that the right to own a military-style weapon is a God-given right. I didn't see that anywhere in the Bible that I read.
People should remember that in the 2000s, the gun lobby got a lot passed: they got riders added to appropriations bills. They got immunity for the gun industry. They successfully managed the expiration of the assault weapons ban.
Our mental health system is broken, and we should fix it.
You can only explain America's gun violence problem through guns, because mental illness doesn't automatically lead to violence, and it doesn't lead to violence anywhere else but America.
Anytime somebody loses a presidential election, there are lots of explanations.
The tweets that I send out are not written by somebody else. They're not vetted through my communications staff.
More Democrats should be speaking without vetting their statements through their staff because it will feel realer.
I do not understand how people can look at the rapid spread of extremism all across the globe and not understand that it is - that it isn't coincidental to the concurrent rapid spread of a very conservative strain of Islam that is paid for out of Saudi Arabia.
In Syria, a progressive foreign policy would have shown military restraint while pumping up our ability to gain political leverage over Syria's benefactors and providing humanitarian funding to make sure that anybody that wanted to leave Syria could.
I think most of the Washington foreign policy establishment exists in a fantasy world when it comes to Syria. They fundamentally don't understand that Russia and Iran, from the beginning, had much more at stake in Syria than the United States did. Russia and Iran were going to do everything possible in order to keep Bashar al-Assad in power.
I think when you have so many people working for American-based think tanks and American-based defense companies, there is always going to be a bent towards proposing American-led solutions for foreign problems. People get paid big money in Washington to come up with ways that America can fix problems overseas, and they are not always right.
Ultimately, stability in Syria will come from decisions made on the ground by the Syrian people and by their immediate neighbors.
There's zero evidence, empirical or anecdotal, that more guns leads to less gun crime.
It's a wonderful story for the gun lobby to tell that if you just load up schools with weapons, you'll be safer. All of the evidence suggests that homes and communities that have more weapons have more gun crimes, not less.
I think Donald Trump believes in putting a wall around America and hoping everything turns out OK.
American values don't begin and end with destroyers and aircraft carriers.
I think progressives understand that we are Americans at the same time as we are global citizens. We are interested first and foremost in creating peace and prosperity here at home, but we aren't blind to the fact that injustice anywhere in the world is meaningful, important, and worth thinking about.
We have a cleaner system of government in this state where people run based on their ideas, not based on their ability to raise money.
The skill of telemarketing does not necessarily translate into governing.
You can just assume that better law enforcement response is going to quell the epidemic of gun violence in this country.
I don't require a background check to contribute to my campaign. And so there are probably lots of people with unsavory backgrounds and pasts who have given to both Democrats and Republicans.
America's strength in the past has been our ability to bring family members to join other family members in the United States and to look at skills but not have it be the only determination of how you get here.
The European Union needs a comprehensive, continent-wise, transnational counter-terrorism center that has the authority to track threats across borders.
The list of erratic actions from Mohammed bin Salman is long: the jailing of royal family members, the detention of the Lebanese prime minister, a nonsensical feud with Qatar, the growing internal repression of political speech, and the disastrous war in Yemen.
There are numerous groups across the country, both local and national, that are working to prevent gun violence in our communities.