A Case For Chris Murphy
Chris Murphy wrote that last week, Senate Republicans forced the Democrats “to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is.” Murphy decided to explain what happened next.
“The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations,” he wrote. “And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare and SNAP are all being targeted. In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps… the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that. Now, we knew that Republicans would largely unanimously oppose them, but we had two objectives here. One, Republicans were forced to put their opinion on record— many for the first time— on the most corrupt parts of Trump and Musk’s agenda. Two, as I’ve been saying, I am going to make every process and procedure as slow and painful as possible for as long as my colleagues choose to ignore the constitutional crisis happening before our eyes.”
So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans’ personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it.
Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires.
The corruption and theft is happening in the open here. The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires— even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children.
They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice… [T]he votes lasted until nearly 5 AM.
This is a five-alarm fire. I don’t think we have two years to plan and fight back. I think we have months. It’s still in our power to stop the destruction of our democracy with mass mobilization and effective opposition from elected officials.
As part of the vote-a-rama that night it was Elizabeth Warren who kicked off a series of votes on Democratic amendments opposing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the first one to oppose tax cuts for Americans making over $10 million annually. More conservative Democrats Mark Kelly (AZ) and Angus King (I-ME) followed up, respectively, with amendments opposing tax cuts for Americans making over $100 million annually and then opposing tax cuts for Americans making over $500 million annually followed. They all failed because… well, Republicans.
“As we begin the budget process,” said Warren on the floor before the series began, “Democrats are asking Republicans questions about the basic principles of what they are planning to do. The first question is whether there is anyone who is so rich that the Republicans think they don’t need a tax giveaway.”
No, Republicans have other things on their minds— mostly the kind of corruption that motivates them. The folks at Public Citizen let us know that on Friday a key component of the crypto-cartel, Coinbase, had some good news. Trump’s new Mafia-style SEC agreed to drop its lawsuit against them. “The SEC abandonment of its case against Coinbase, wrote Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, “is proof positive that the crypto industry’s flood of campaign spending has paid off. The now-abandoned lawsuit against Coinbase involved the most basic assertion of SEC authority: Coinbase cryptocurrency offerings are actually securities and must be registered and regulated as such. Retreat from this basic assertion is a massive gift to the industry, which can only be understood in light of its massive political spending in the last election. The new SEC stance will enable crypto to penetrate further into the economy, not only putting consumers at risk when the crypto bubble inevitably collapses, but posing an increasing systemic threat to the overall financial system. When the crypto crash happens— and it will— this decision will go down as one that made it far worse than it would have been.”He concluded with a warning that “The SEC decision is also an important marker in the Trump administration’s rush to abandon prosecution and enforcement actions against corporate criminals and wrongdoers. This is not just an abandonment of those already wronged by corporate wrongdoers, it is an invitation to a corporate crime spree and epidemic of corporate wrongdoing. Americans, watch your head, watch your wallet, and watch your back.”
And speaking of Chris Murphy, once Kamala cashed and burned, the media groupthink primary refused to acknowledge Murphy as a 2028 presidential contender. Hammering more consistently than any other political leader has changed that. Today, in fact, a NY Times headline noted that he’s emerged was a clear voice countering Trump while defining the “billionaire takeover of American democracy.” Annie Karni noted that “He is also seizing a political opportunity to position himself as a future national leader for Democrats who find themselves deep in the wilderness as they seek a strategy for simultaneously rebuilding their party and resisting Trump… Murphy has spent the past three years immersing himself in the literature and ideas of the ‘new right,’ listening to the podcast Red Scare and reading thought leaders like Curtis Yarvin and Patrick Deneen. He credits that immersion for his being prepared for Trump’s return to power... [A] a constitutional crisis can offer an opportunity for a civics refresher, and Murphy appears to be breaking through.”
Karni noted that “Murphy insists he is not just doing all this to set up a run for president, in part because he thinks it is no sure thing that there will even be a race to enter in four years. ‘Right now, there is a distinct possibility that we do not have a free and fair election in 2028, and all of our work is to make sure that doesn’t happen,’ he said. Murphy said he can easily envision a future where ‘the press is so demoralized, the opposition is so beleaguered and harassed that you just don’t have the ability to mount an opposition… Nothing matters other than the question of whether or not we let the billionaires destroy our democracy,’ he said. ‘There’s a ticking time bomb inside our body politic right now. It’s very possible this thing could be completely rigged by the summer or fall of this year.’ So Murphy has decided to set his hair on fire to get people to pay attention. He is on YouTube, doing interviews with [comedian Hasan] Minhaj and political influencers like Brian Tyler Cohen, Mehdi Hassan and Jack Cocchiarella. He is on Substack, talking to Anand Giridharadas. He is on TikTok talking to Aaron Parnas. And he is wherever you get your podcasts, talking to Jon Favreau.”
But is he still the centrist establishment politician he was when he joined the New Dems after being first elected to the House? Karni offers some hope that he isn't:
Murphy is also shifting with the times. These days, he bemoans the fact that economic populists in Congress like Senators Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, are treated like radicals. He thinks their ideas have the best chance of crossing over and picking up voters who are currently in Trump’s camp. But in 2016, Murphy was an early and eager backer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign over Sanders in what became a heated Democratic primary.
His party’s devastating 2024 losses, coupled with Trump’s blatant abuses of his authority, have made Murphy rethink a conventional approach to politics. These days, he has been meeting with his Senate colleagues to persuade them that this is not a time to play by any old political rules.
“They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt,” he has told other Democrats of Trump and Republicans. “They are deliberately hiding what they are doing so that responsible, thoughtful, fact-based people will say nothing.”