Yesterday, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) spoke on the Senate floor in support of a War Powers Resolution and an end to Trump’s disastrous war of choice in Iran. Once again, Senate Republicans struck it down. What will it take to get Republicans to think for themselves and stop blindly following orders from Trump?
Sen. Murphy joins Jen to discuss how Republicans are helping the Trump administration evade accountability for the war on Iran. They also outline the permanent damage done to our international alliances (including NATO), the absurdity of sending Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to negotiate a peace deal with Iran, and lessons to learn from Orban’s defeat in Hungary.
Senator Chris Murphy is the junior United States Senator for Connecticut. He serves on the Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Stay connected with the Senator on his personal Substack here.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of the Contrarian. We are delighted to have back with us Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut Welcome Senator.
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah, thanks, thanks for having me back.
Jen Rubin
You gave a speech on the floor today on the War Powers Act. Tell us what you said and what you’re hearing from your colleagues.
Senator Chris Murphy
Well, first, it’s just extraordinary that we haven’t had a single hearing in the United States Senate on this war with Iran. It’s obviously the sort of most major exercise of American military power in the Middle East in you know, a decade or more. It’s going very badly, it’s costing billions of dollars, and it’s just extraordinary to me, and should be extraordinary to everybody that their Senate and their House have not conducted any oversight. There hasn’t been a a vote to authorize the war, but there also hasn’t been a single hearing. Like, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseths, they have not shown up to Congress at all, to answer questions in a public forum. So this is the only debate that we’re getting.
Every week, Democrats are bringing these privileged resolutions before the Senate floor. We’re allowed to do that under the rules. asking our colleagues to vote to withdraw us from the Iran war. Republicans, with the exception of Rand Paul, have held together to back up the president. I don’t know if that will last, because, as we pointed out in our speeches tonight, the war is dangerously off the rails. Obviously, gas prices are going through the roof, the global energy supply chain is in meltdown, a new war is breaking out between Israel and Lebanon, and it doesn’t feel like any of our objectives are anywhere near being accomplished or being in the realm of possibility of being accomplished.
And that’s really what I talked about today, and we can go deeper into this, Jen, but, you know, whether it’s trying to get rid of their missile and drone program, trying to stop their nuclear program from moving towards a bomb. reopening the Strait of Hormuz, ushering in a new, less dangerous regime. None of those objectives seem to be anywhere close to having been accomplished, and I don’t think any of them are going to be accomplished. What is the primary, result of this now month-and-a-half long war is that Iran is more powerful than ever, and what a disaster that is for the United States.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. What do your Republican colleagues say in response? They think everything is going swimmingly, they don’t think there’s any need for them to act? What rationale do they even have?
Senator Chris Murphy
Well, I mean, they don’t really, you know, have any thoughts or rationales because, you know, they’re employees. I mean, that’s essentially how they operate. They are employees of Donald Trump, they take orders from Donald Trump, they are not allowed in the employee handbook to ever question the CEO, and so they show up for work every day, take their orders, implement their orders, and their orders right now are to shut up. Again, this is really wild, right? That the Foreign Relations Committee— a committee that I sit on—has not had a single meeting about the war, has not held a single hearing. That’s never, ever happened before.
I mean. whatever you thought or senators thought about the Iran war, the Afghanistan war, President Obama’s proposal to get involved in Syria, we had hearings. We forced them to come up and answer questions. So Trump has told them. pretend like this isn’t happening, don’t ask us any questions, and they are dutifully complying. Now, I think at some point, there’s political pressure here, as this war continues to spiral out of control, as we get closer to the election, as gas prices inch towards $5 a gallon on average nationally. I think it’ll be harder for Republicans to just continue to vote to back the president up, but it doesn’t seem yet that that political pressure has come to bear.
Jen Rubin
I don’t understand where we are right now. Donald Trump, in the same day, has said that we’re gonna have more negotiations, though maybe not. He said he’s still prepared to bomb their infrastructure. Where are we? Where is he in this process? Are we wrapping things up, as he says, or are we expanding this for?
Senator Chris Murphy
Oh, I mean, I don’t think we have any idea where he is. I mean, I imagine he spends a couple minutes a day thinking about this. He was at a UFC cage match this weekend, he was in a Twitter fight with the Pope, he seems to spend most of his time overseeing plans to expand the White House and try to make money off of his presidency. It’s probably just a matter of who talked to him last. So I have no idea what the president is doing.
There’s no serious negotiation happening. I mean, J.D. Vance went out to Islamabad, but couldn’t sort of stand to stay there for more than 24 hours. That’s not how negotiation works. You have to sit at the table for weeks in order to get a significant diplomatic agreement with an adversary like Iran. They’re negotiating with somebody different all the time, and it seems as if he’s just making up the strategy on a day-by-day basis, this latest plan to confront Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz by helping them close it. Like, it’s out of science fiction, but it seems to have been you know, made up on the back of a napkin 24 hours ago, so there’s clearly no grand plan, there’s no strategy, there’s no real negotiation. We’re just, you know, stuck in a conflict right now that we can’t win.
Jen Rubin
Are you concerned about who is doing the negotiations? We have two or maybe three people who have never negotiated anything nearly complex. They don’t have with them any experts on the nuclear program. According to outside experts who have looked at this. They have misunderstood or misread things that the Iranians have put forward. How can it possibly be that we’re doing this in this half-assed fashion?
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I mean, hopefully this will be remedied very quickly, in the next two elections, but yes, the president has deeply unqualified people who are negotiating. He tends to prefer people who have had history in negotiating real estate deals, because he sees the world through a real estate lens, and so you have folks who have negotiated you know, mortgage documents, but have never come close to a complicated nuclear program like the one that Iran has.
Listen, whether we like it or not, Iran believes that they have a right to enrich uranium. I would have loved for them to have given up their enrichment program under the JCPOA, but they were not willing to do that. So instead, we kept that enrichment at a very low level, and we put inspectors on the ground on a daily basis to make sure that they never got close to a bomb. I just don’t think there’s any way that Trump is gonna get a better deal, and in fact, he is very likely to get a much worse deal because Iran right now has far more leverage than they did when Obama was negotiating this agreement. And Obama had better negotiators. Because Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz. And they had not closed the strait, they were not tolling the Strait of Hormuz in 2013 and 2014, so they feel like they are in a much stronger position, even with this war and the damage that has done inside Iran, than they were during the Obama administration. So, this formula, really bad negotiators, and an adversary who has more leverage than they did last time, seems almost certain to result in no deal, or a deal that is definitely going to be worse than the one Obama negotiated.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. The other casualty in this war seems to once more be NATO. Donald Trump is squawking about pulling out of NATO. The Europeans have now come up with a plan specifically to exclude the United States if there is a peace deal and the straits have to be cleared. Is NATO hanging by a thread here? How concerned are you that we have permanently damaged what has been the most successful alliance in history?
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah, I think there is certainly permanent damage here, because even if you have a pro-NATO president. in 2028 or 2029, the Europeans have been burned so badly, and would have no confidence that that is a new permanent state of affairs, that it is likely they will not reinvest in this partnership for the long term. So I do think that President Trump has done some serious long-term damage, maybe fatal to the alliance.
And of course, you know, how offensive is it to them to be told by the President of the United States. after having, you know, broken a raw egg on the floor, that it’s their responsibility. The people who told him, don’t drop the raw egg on the floor, he looks at them and says, it’s your job to come up with a plan. to help put it back together. That’s essentially what’s happening here, and I think for the Europeans, you know, rightly so. That was the last straw. They’re making their own plans for how to defend themselves, how to protect their interests in the Middle East, and that is likely going to be the state of affairs for the short and medium term.
Jen Rubin
Let me switch gears to DHS spending, this plan that the Republicans have for a skinny reconciliation. Where do you think things stand, and are they really prepared to put through, on 51 votes, DHS funding with zero controls on a department that has killed numerous Americans?
Senator Chris Murphy
Oh, yeah, I think they’re completely prepared to do that, because, you know, what is left of, right-wing ideas, other than the marginalization of minorities and immigrants in this country? It kind of is the central organizing premise for the Republican Party and the right wing today is the idea that all of your problems are due to immigrants entering this country. And so if they lose the ability to continue to punish immigrants for the problems that have been created by a deeply unfair economy and a billionaire in corporate control of, our economy, then I just don’t think they have anything left.
So I think they are going to use reconciliation, this process whereby they can pass anything much of anything with 50 votes, to fund the Department of Homeland Security. And though this is a little bit in the Senate rules weeds, it’s not unimportant. Reconciliation has been used by both Republicans and Democrats, but never before to fund the ongoing annual appropriations of the government. That has always required 60 votes. So I think that we are just definitely on a path for 50 votes to be the governing majority on everything in the United States Senate. Republicans now are increasingly expanding the things that can be passed with 50 votes, and I think Democrats will continue in that trend.
Jen Rubin
And when the skinny budget passes or doesn’t pass, everything else is left over. Do Republicans expect, after having excluded Democrats, that you’re suddenly going to sit down and agree and negotiate with them on everything else, including the $1.5 trillion dollar request for the Defense Department? How does that work?
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah, listen, I don’t know. I mean, I have a difference of opinion with my fellow Democrats on this question. I was one of the few Democrats that didn’t vote for the other budgets. I did not think it was wise to give Democratic votes, for instance to fund the Department of Justice when the president, at the time, was openly advertising he was going to use the funds we were giving him. to have the Department of Justice engage in a witch hunt operation against his political opponents.
So I think we should drive a harder bargain with these other agencies, and that we should only fund agencies that are actually going. to uphold the law. The Department of Homeland Security was the most out of control. You know, one federal judge found that it was in violation of over 90 court orders. That’s pretty stunning, to have one agency openly violating almost 100 court orders. But these other agencies weren’t acting much more lawfully. I think we should drive a harder bargain, but there might be, once again, a split. Where some Democrats in our caucus just think they should, you know, kind of act as if it’s business as usual, ask for a couple reforms in the margins, and keep those agencies open and operating.
Jen Rubin
Last question for you. We had elections in Hungary on Sunday. It was a stunning victory for, if you will, the pro-democracy forces. Viktor Orban, who was the hero of the MAGA, coterie, was badly defeated. What do you take from that? What lessons can you extract, or what hope does that give you for democracy in America?
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah, it was an extraordinary election, and I think I take two things from it. There were a lot of you know, very thoughtful pundits and observers of Hungarian politics that thought Hungarian democracy was dead, that Orban had done what Trump is trying to do, that he had captured the judiciary, the regulatory agencies, and the media landscape such that the opposition party was never ever going to be able to win an election. He had rigged the rules of democracy, like Republicans were trying to do here, such that the opposition had to win by an extraordinary margin. in order to take control of the Parliament. And so what’s really wild is that, those, predictions or prognostications of Hungary’s death were not correct, because the Hungarian people just said, no, we’re not ready to give up. And they turned out and mobilized at extraordinary levels, an 80% turnout, people who just would not give up, people who were determined, even with the capture of the media institutions, to tell the truth one person at a time.
The second lesson, I think, is that the corruption message really took hold. That, you know, over time, people understood that what Orban was doing was capturing the democracy to enrich himself and a cabal of his friends. And people chose not to accept that level of graft. I think there has been a feeling here in the United States that you just can’t win on a message of Trump’s corruption, that people assume that all of government is corrupt and Trump is just more public about his corruption. I think that’s wrong politically and naively fatalist. People are starting to really catch on to the fact that government is actually not as corrupt as you think it is. What Trump is doing is far outside the norm, and so for me, it’s a lesson that if you don’t give up, you can turn around even the most broken of democracies, and America is not as broken as Hungarian democracy was prior to this election, and that if you talk about corruption, you are consistent in talking about corruption, refusing to normalize it. It can be A breakthrough message to save democracy.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. And I do have actually one more question. Do you think the president is of sound mind, and if not, what the hell are we gonna do about it?
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah, I don’t think he is. I mean, obviously, he has always been erratic, but this threat, to end the Persian civilization, right, to essentially proudly commit war crimes, as he said, he was gonna target. power plants and bridges that would have easily killed thousands of innocent Iranian civilians, just did feel more off the hook than anything else he had ever threatened or promised, and so I certainly was one of the early folks to raise the prospect of the 25th Amendment. Obviously, that’s, you know, not going to save us in the short term, but I don’t think that we should just accede that this version of Trump is the same one. from the first term. There is something spiraling in his mind, and we should just be transparent, and now we talk about that.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Sarah, for all you’re doing, for your clarity, and for joining us once again. It’s always a pleasure. Have a great day.
Senator Chris Murphy
Thanks, Jen. Take care.
