As lawmakers, our job is to listen to our constituents. If our phones are ringing off the hook with people demanding to know where we stand on an issue, we pay attention.
Chris Murphy
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.
Rarely do political contributions lead to direct quid pro quo transactions - donations for votes - and those that cross this line normally get caught.
From the outside, Qatar and U.A.E. likely look like twins - small, oil-rich Sunni monarchies that are largely friendly to the U.S. But their philosophies on the region are very different - Qatar does not fear Islamism as does the U.A.E.
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 Mental Health Reform Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2016. It was one of my proudest moments in Congress.
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 served on the committee in the U.S. House that wrote the Affordable Care Act. I defended it back home in endless town halls. I got elected to the Senate, and when no one wanted to stand up for the ACA in its early days, I took up the cause, going to the Senate floor nearly every week to extol its virtues.
The most popular health care plan in the country is Medicare. It delivers the best care at the lowest cost - it's better than any other part of our health care system. But most people can only get it when they're over 65. I don't think you should have to wait that long.
We have a long, proud history of making things here in Connecticut. We're home to large companies like Electric Boat, Pratt & Whitney, and Sikorsky, as well as their thousands of suppliers.
For far too long, Washington has denied the American citizens of Puerto Rico vital human services and adequate health care funding.
The gun lobby is certainly politically powerful, but it loses as many races as it wins.
Saudi Arabia is an important country to the United States.
Background checks applied universally and nationally would take millions of illegal guns off the streets of our cities.
I can't throw a nickel from the Capitol without hitting a think tank that's been financed by one of the Gulf States.
Participatory democracies. Open economies. Web-based communication. All American innovations to the great conundrums of the globe.
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.
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.
It can be frustrating that, despite widespread support for common sense gun safety measures, Congress is moving at a snail's pace. But remember that great change takes time.
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.
Anytime somebody loses a presidential election, there are lots of explanations.
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.
There is just no substitute for seeing a disaster area firsthand and getting the chance to speak in person to victims and responders.
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.
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.
I'm generally pretty responsible and diligent, but people make mistakes.
As I'm learning, Republicans seem to only care about deficits when a Democrat is in the White House.
One of my chief criticisms of U.S. international policy is that Congress has largely abdicated its foreign policy-making responsibilities to the executive branch.
The tweets that I send out are not written by somebody else. They're not vetted through my communications staff.
When I got to the Senate, I made overhauling our nation's mental health laws one of my top priorities.
More Democrats should be speaking without vetting their statements through their staff because it will feel realer.
We simply believe that we should lean into the world with something other than the pointed edge of a sword.
I can't stand the idea of a veteran risking her or his life for this country, suffering the wounds of battle, and then being kicked to the curb as a result of those wounds. But that is exactly what has happened to tens of thousands of men & women who have fought and bled for our country.
The skill of telemarketing does not necessarily translate into governing.
The world is a mess, and while there is no simple pill America can administer to fix things, what we know is that there is significant room for progressives to articulate a foreign policy vision that is truly our own.
ISIL is a terrorist army like we have never seen - they cannot be ignored.
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.
Sympathy is important, but it rings hollow if not followed by action.
I would be a rich man if I had a quarter for every time one of my Republican colleagues on the Foreign Relations Committee utters some variation of the sentence, 'President Obama doesn't have a strategy to defeat ISIS.' It's their calling card on the committee - and on the campaign trail.
America doesn't have the moral authority or weight to tip the scales in this fight between moderate Islam and less tolerant Islam. Muslim communities and Muslim nations need to be leading edge of this fight.
The Saudis helped the U.S. ensure that the Russians never got a meaningful foothold in the Middle East.
The political alliance between the House of Saud and the conservative Wahhabi clerics is as old as the nation, and the alliance has resulted in billions funneled to and through the Wahhabi movement.
Congress should pass legislation that mandates increased information sharing for any country that wants to participate in the Visa Waiver Program.
The European Union needs a comprehensive, continent-wise, transnational counter-terrorism center that has the authority to track threats across borders.
Terrorist groups are working and communicating across E.U. borders - our efforts to track those groups must do so as well.
The United States has the best intelligence-gathering operation in the world. We should provide a greater level of training and assistance to the E.U. to help them develop a more robust counter-terrorism platform.
The most powerful force when changing people's hearts and minds is a person-to-person conversation.
There are numerous groups across the country, both local and national, that are working to prevent gun violence in our communities.
If we want our laws to change, we need to elect people who are willing to change them.
Our veterans made a commitment to our country when they signed up.
