Chris Murphy

“There's no denying that if I were designing a health care system from scratch, I'd build a Medicare for All system.”

“I arrived in Hartford as a 25-year-old naive state legislator who believed in universal health care. I rose to become the 29-year-old Chairman of the legislature's Health Committee.”

“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.”

“I'm generally pretty responsible and diligent, but people make mistakes.”

“Washington is agonizingly slow at learning from its mistakes. Especially in the Middle East.”

“Whenever I travel abroad, I try to visit U.S. troops just to say thanks.”

“If you were a Democrat getting ready to run for office in the 2000s, as I was, you were told to stay clear of guns... I really regret that. I regret having listened to that advice.”

“Sympathy is important, but it rings hollow if not followed by action.”

“ISIL is a terrorist army like we have never seen - they cannot be ignored.”

“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 gun lobby is certainly politically powerful, but it loses as many races as it wins.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One of the smartest investments we can make in Connecticut is in job training programs.”

“Health care, whether I like it or not, is at the foundation of my public service.”

“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.”

“Washington can be a frustrating place.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”