WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, on Thursday released a statement on his decision to vote ‘no’ on the Republican-led spending bill.

WATCH VIDEO HERE

“Trump has a plan – and he’s implementing it – to destroy our economy and our government, to create a crisis that allows him to hand our government over to his billionaire friends and to suspend our democracy. I wish that weren’t true, but it is. The question then is this: does the funding bill make it easier or harder for Trump to implement that plan? I judge that it makes it easier, and so I can’t support it. 

“The basics here are this. Republicans are in charge, [and] they need Democratic votes to pass a funding bill. But they never negotiated with Democrats. They didn’t even try. They wrote their own partisan bill. They filled it with all sorts of right-wing shit. This isn’t a ‘continuing resolution.’ It doesn’t just continue last year’s funding, even though the press is reporting it that way. It makes big changes to law. And they’re all changes designed to make it easier for Trump to implement that plan to destroy our country.

“For instance, it makes massive cuts to housing programs, to Social Security, to programs for health care for working families. That paves the way for Musk to advance his illegal assault on those government services. It gives Trump brand new spending powers – for instance, the ability to start new military programs that haven’t even been authorized by Congress. At this moment of crisis, that sounds like a really dangerous idea. And it takes key guardrails off of presidential spending authority that allows Trump and Musk to more easily move money from one account to the other.

“Now listen, Trump and Musk are going to keep acting illegally, no matter what this funding bill says. Whether we stop them – that’s going to be up to the courts and up to our ability to mobilize people all over this country against their agenda, which is deeply, deeply unpopular. But by passing a bill that makes their plan easier to implement, Democrats risk putting a bipartisan veneer of endorsement on their campaign to give our government to the billionaires and to destroy the rule of law. And I just won’t be a part of that.”

###