Chris Murphy has been warning for months that voters want Democrats to fight. This summer, the Connecticut senator is picking a battle that puts him at odds with his Democratic colleagues.
Murphy has made surprising moves over the last month to protest bipartisan government funding talks as a member of the Appropriations Committee, demonstrating his vision of what opposition to President Donald Trump should look like and further stoking speculation about his own presidential ambitions.
The third-term senator said in a recent interview that Trump “doesn’t give a fuck what we write” into spending legislation. And so he sees no reason to participate in the drafting of funding bills if the president is going to keep withholding billions of dollars Congress already approved and goading Republican senators to claw back more.
“Every single day, there’s new evidence that our democracy is falling, and you’ve got to take stands. You have to take fights,” Murphy explained. “I just worry — every time that we go along with these appropriations bills, we’re putting a bipartisan veneer of endorsement on an illegal process that’s ultimately part of his campaign to destroy our democracy.”
As the top Democrat on the appropriations panel that funds the Department of Homeland Security, Murphy occupies a role that has historically demanded across-the-aisle collaboration. But in recent weeks, he opposed all spending measures advanced during Senate Appropriations Committee markups for which he was present, challenged his Republican counterpart on the DHS funding bill and voted “no” on the Senate’s first bipartisan funding package of the year.
“I’m nothing if not consistent. I don’t like the position I’m in,” Murphy said. “It’s lonely. 28-to-1 votes are lonely.”
So far, Murphy isn’t slamming his colleagues for embracing bipartisan negotiations, and his peers aren’t directly criticizing his approach. But they aren’t exactly praising him either.
“He has the right to his opinion,” said the top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, Patty Murray of Washington. “And I just have the opinion that the more we can do to get bills done, the better chance we have of getting better things for our country.”
Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, one of Murphy’s friends and another senior member of the Appropriations Committee, said Democrats have a duty to at least attempt to strike a cross-party compromise on federal spending ahead of the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline.
“I’m not his spokesperson,” said Schatz, who is in line to be the chamber’s Democratic whip in the next Congress. “So all I can say is: We’ve been demanding a bipartisan process. So when there’s a step in that direction, I think it’s our obligation to try to be constructive.”
While Murphy has never been a moderate, he has grown rapidly into a liberal firebrand in recent years. Once best known on Capitol Hill for his advocacy for gun control and his foreign policy expertise, he’s now a frequent anti-Trump voice on cable news shows and has waded into controversial social topics like the nation’s “male identity” crisis.
But Murphy’s latest political stand against Trump comes as his name is floated for a bigger-stage battle against Republicans — this time as a presidential contender in 2028.
If the 52-year-old senator seeks the Democratic nomination in three years, his protest of government funding bills could help differentiate him as a candidate who fought the Trump administration with more than just verbal criticism.
“It does fit, right? These are strategies that would make sense if he’s interested in a national platform and to run for office like president,” said Hans Noel, a Georgetown University professor who studies presidential nominations.
“There’s some appeal to a lot of voters — of fighting — especially at the national stage, where he doesn’t have to worry about winning over allies for legislative progress,” Noel continued. “Murphy has been somebody who’s been talking on a national stage for a long time. It’s not completely new. But he’s somebody who’s got that kind of appeal.”
This past week, Murphy spent his birthday at an event with progressives in Arizona, where he talked broadly about the need for Democrats to balance opposition with real policy commitments: “We can’t just be against Donald Trump. We’ve got to give people a vision of something different.”
Since Trump’s election last November, Murphy has grown a beard, announced the end of his 17-year marriage and sparked rumors about romantic ties to a prominent Democratic strategist. In April, he hosted a town hall back in rural North Carolina — more than 500 miles from his blue home state. Then this summer, he launched a PAC aimed at taking on Trump and Republicans in Congress.
Murphy hasn’t always resisted negotiations with Republicans. In 2022, after a gunman left 21 people dead inside a Texas elementary school, he undertook weeks of painstaking talks that resulted in the first significant federal gun-control legislation in two decades. It was the culmination of a nearly decade-long fight for Murphy, who represented Sandy Hook Elementary School in the House at the time of that devastating 2012 shooting.
His next foray into bipartisan talks did not have a happy ending. Last year he scrupulously crafted the high-profile bipartisan border deal with Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford, in an attempt to enact Congress’ first major immigration overhaul in more than three decades. Then Trump chilled Republican support for the bill.
To Murphy, it signaled that Republicans couldn’t be trusted to be good-faith actors in negotiations to fund the government: “I think that drama was early proof that they’re never going to cross him,” he said of Republicans’ loyalty to Trump.
This belief was further cemented when Murphy’s GOP colleagues cleared Trump’s $9 billion rescission request last month targeting public broadcasting and foreign aid.
“They can say that they’re going to honor the words on the page,” Murphy said. Yet if Trump “decides to ignore the law,” he continued, “I just don’t think that my Republican colleagues are going to really fight to protect it.”
Democratic leadership’s interest in engaging in bipartisan funding negotiations, from which Murphy is abstaining, is a relatively new development. Just a month ago, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer penned a lengthy “dear colleague” letter insinuating that his members should cut off cross-party talks if Republicans accepted the White House’s rescissions package.
Nine days later, Senate Republicans banded together to pass that bill. And five days after that, Schumer stood with his House counterpart, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, to announce that Democrats still “want to pursue a bipartisan, bicameral appropriations process.”
It has left Murphy as the lone Democratic appropriator continually opposing the funding bills his colleagues are trying to advance, even as he readily admits it’s not the substance of the spending measures he’s against.
“The bills themselves are good, bipartisan bills,” said Murphy. “It’s just — I don’t believe that anything in there is actually going to be implemented.”
This is the case Murphy said he wants to get through to Sen. Katie Britt, the Alabama Republican who chairs the Homeland Security appropriations panel opposite Murphy. The two lawmakers were seen last month in a heated exchange in the well of the Senate floor after passage of the clawback request. Britt described the conversation, captured by C-SPAN cameras, as “a spirited dialogue,” vowing: “I’ll continue to work in good faith, as I always have.”
Murphy, however, said negotiations on the DHS funding bill will be meaningless if Trump and Republicans are going to undermine the spending directives when the measure becomes law. “We had an animated discussion,” Murphy said of his talk with Britt. “Obviously it’s hard to write a bill when the administration is going to stab you in the back as soon as you write it, especially in a space as difficult as immigration and DHS.”
He pointed to specific examples of how Trump has already undermined appropriators, including the president’s efforts to fund the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center in Florida by diverting money Congress appropriated for “humane” alternatives to detainment.
“And you know,” Murphy continued, “he’s going to use the money in this budget to treat immigrants like animals.”
Jordain Carney, Katherine Tully-McManus and Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.
