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Christopher Murphy

 
Christopher Murphy Image
Title
Senator
Connecticut
Party Affiliation
Democrat
2019
2024
Social Media Accounts
Twitter
: @
SenMurphyOffice
Facebook
: @
chrismurphyct
Youtube
: @
senchrismurphy
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Representative Offices
Address
120 Huyshope Ave.
Building
Colt Gateway
Suite
Suite 401
City/State/Zip
Hartford CT, 06106
Phone
860-549-8463
Fax
860-524-5091
News
09/25/2024 --rollcall
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., pictured at a news conference on Tuesday, is preparing for his last post-election wrap-up as leader.
09/24/2024 --rollcall
Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford is pictured in the Capitol during votes on July 31. Lankford on Tuesday blocked a resolution expressing a sense of the Senate that every patient should have the right to emergency health care, including abortion, regardless of where they live, saying that “there is no state in America where a woman faces prosecution for having an abortion.”
09/17/2024 --rollcall
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., talks with reporters in the Capitol after last votes of the week on Thursday.
09/16/2024 --rep_am
After the first attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump – the country is now at a point where there is a running count of the attempts on the Republican presidential candidate’s life – we questioned whether Democrats and the corporate media would cool down their unhinged and dishonest rhetoric. “This is about how far [...]
09/16/2024 --rollcall
A reporter prepares a question for President Joe Biden before he spoke with reporters Monday on the South Lawn of the White House about the latest assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
09/09/2024 --rollcall
Ron Rowe, acting director of the Secret Service, leaves the Capitol in July after a briefing with senators.
09/04/2024 --rep_am
Hit with constant reports of illegal immigrants, many of whom are among the millions let in under the Biden administration, committing serious, often violent crimes, open-borders proponents are leaning on one of their favorite talking points: Immigrants commit fewer crimes than Americans who were born in the country. Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., made this [...]
08/19/2024 --rep_am
The latest reported increase in homelessness in Connecticut isn’t huge, statistically speaking, but it’s troubling enough to generate some serious angst in high places. U.S. Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., doesn’t have voting power in the Connecticut legislature, but he intends to make his feelings known in the next legislative session. The data indicate more [...]
07/21/2024 --rollcall
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the South Lawn of the White House on July 11, 2022.
07/18/2024 --eastbaytimes
Politics, it is said, is the art and science of persuasion. A politician gathers power by convincing people — but needs to get their attention first.
07/18/2024 --dailycamera
Politics, it is said, is the art and science of persuasion. A politician gathers power by convincing people — but needs to get their attention first.
07/18/2024 --timescall
Politics, it is said, is the art and science of persuasion. A politician gathers power by convincing people — but needs to get their attention first.
07/18/2024 --greeleytribune
Politics, it is said, is the art and science of persuasion. A politician gathers power by convincing people — but needs to get their attention first.
03/29/2024 --forbes
A Japanese independent film distributor picked the film up after Universal Pictures left Japan off the film’s global release schedule.
03/29/2024 --rawstory
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for its free newsletters here.A federal appeals court decision upholding Pennsylvania’s rules for voting by mail could mean that tens of thousands of ballots are rejected in this year’s election because they lack a date or are misdated. But the full impact of the ruling is still up in the air while the parties who brought the case decide whether to appeal.A panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Wednesday that a Pennsylvania law requiring mail voters to handwrite a date on the return envelope did not violate a provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that’s meant to protect voters from being denied the right to register to vote.The decision could have broad implications: If plaintiffs appeal to the Supreme Court and justices uphold it, it could become precedent for the entire country, rather than just the jurisdictions in the 3rd Circuit. Such a ruling could limit how the Civil Rights Act applies to requirements for casting a ballot.And some conservative justices already hinted in an earlier ruling that they’re skeptical of the argument that the date requirement violates the Act. When the court nullified a previous opinion from the 3rd Circuit that ruled such ballots should be counted, three of the court’s conservatives wrote that the lower court’s opinion was “likely wrong.”The plaintiffs will now need to make a choice about whether it is worth pushing this case forward, or containing the decision to the 3rd Circuit, said Derek Muller, an election law professor at Notre Dame Law School, said.“I think there’s a lot of challenges raising it with the Supreme Court if you are the plaintiffs,” he said. “You’ve already got three justices who sketched out a preliminary position against your position, so I just think it’s an uphill battle to go to the court and make that claim now.”Andy Hoover, a spokesperson for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, which represented the plaintiffs, said, “We are analyzing the ruling and have not made a decision about next steps.”The Department of State, which was a defendant in the case but took the view that the ballots should not be rejected, said in a statement that it was “reviewing potential next steps” and highlighted recent changes it made to the return envelopes that it hopes will reduce the number of ballots rejected this year.Even if it is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court — given where we are in the court’s current term — Muller thinks any decision would be unlikely to come before 2025.“My guess is this rule will be in place for 2024.”There may be other action in the courts in the meantime.Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia-based attorney who regularly works with Democratic candidates, is currently representing a township supervisor candidate in a case tangentially related to the 3rd Circuit appeal.“I think the majority got it wrong here,” said Bonin, who was also involved in a 2021 case from Lehigh County on the same issue. “This was a remedial statute intended to remove all sorts of barriers to the right to vote. I thought that Congress was very clear that this goes to all the steps” that involve ensuring a vote is counted.The three-judge panel’s ruling can still be appealed to the full 3rd Circuit by April 10.For their part, Republicans are embracing the decision as a victory.“The Court ruling is a gigantic win for Pennsylvania, the nation, and election integrity,” said Chairman Lawrence Tabas of the Pennsylvania GOP, which was one of the intervening defendants in the case.Wednesday’s ruling, from a three judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, centered on whether the date requirement under Pennsylvania election law violated a part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act known as the “materiality provision.”That provision says a person cannot be denied the right to vote because of “an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting, if such error or omission is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote.”The majority on the panel ruled that the provision only applies when the state is determining who may vote.“In other words, its role stops at the door of the voting place,” Judge Thomas Ambro, an appointee of former Democratic President Bill Clinton, wrote for the majority. “The Provision does not apply to rules, like the date requirement, that govern how a qualified voter must cast his ballot for it to be counted.”Mike Lee, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a statement that if the decision stands, thousands of Pennsylvanians could lose their vote over a “meaningless paperwork error.”“The ballots in question in this case come from voters who are eligible and who met the submission deadline,” Lee said. “In passing the Civil Rights Act, Congress put a guardrail in place to be sure that states don’t erect unnecessary barriers that disenfranchise voters. It’s unfortunate that the court failed to recognize that principle. Voters lose as a result of this ruling.”Ruling distinguishes registration barriers from voting rulesUnlike the last time this question was before the 3rd Circuit, the court split on the issue, voting 2-1 against the plaintiffs.Ambro, along with Judge Cindy Chung — an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden — took the view that the materiality provision is limited to documents related to a voter registering to vote, which would “restrict who may vote.”“It does not preempt state requirements on how qualified voters may cast a valid ballot, regardless what (if any) purpose those rules serve,” the opinion read.Much of the decision came down to whether the provision deals only with documents related to registering to vote, or whether its reference to “other acts requisite to voting” applies to other documents voters may encounter when trying to cast a ballot. Ambro and Chung argued that when the materiality provision is read in context with the sentences around it, along with the discussion among legislators who wrote it, it was clear that it related only to registration documents.They also argued that rejecting undated or improperly dated ballots did not take away the voter’s ability to vote and that states had the freedom to make rules concerning how votes are to be cast, such as rejecting mail ballots that have identifiable markings on the secrecy envelope.“A voter who fails to abide by state rules prescribing how to make a vote effective is not “den[ied] the right . . . to vote” when his ballot is not counted,” Ambro wrote. “If state law provides that ballots completed in different colored inks, or secrecy envelopes containing improper markings, or envelopes missing a date, must be discounted, that is a legislative choice that federal courts might review if there is unequal application, but they have no power to review under the Materiality Provision.”Judge Patty Schwartz — an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama — disagreed, noting that the date on the mail ballot return envelope is in relation to a declaration that states “I hereby declare that I am qualified to vote in this election,” which makes it fall under the provision.She also pointed out that the 1964 Civil Rights Act defines “voting” as “all action necessary to make a vote effective including, but not limited to, registration or other action required by State law prerequisite to voting, casting a ballot, and having such ballot counted and included in the appropriate totals of votes cast.”When this section is read in conjunction with the materiality provision, she argued, the dating requirement becomes subject to that provision.How we got hereWednesday’s decision came as part of an appeal of a November 2023 ruling from U.S. District Judge Susan Baxter in the Western District of Pennsylvania.Shortly after the 2023 election, she ruled that the whether the ballot envelope had a date was “immaterial” to a voter’s eligibility, and that ballots should not be rejected over what is essentially a technicality.“There are many reasons to date a document,” Baxter wrote at the time, adding, “Dates may also be wholly irrelevant, as in this case. The requirement at issue here is irrelevant in determining when the voter signed their declaration.”Her ruling was just part of a string of disputes over whether to count undated or incorrectly dated mail ballots that have been before the courts since the state’s no-excuse mail voting law, Act 77, passed in 2019.That law required that voters sign and date the outer return envelope.A 2021 case out of Lehigh County challenged the provision, citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s materiality provision.In 2022, a separate three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously agreed in the Lehigh case that the date issue was immaterial, but the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the ruling later that year, after one of the candidates in the race in question conceded.That left the question up in the air again ahead of the 2022 midterm election, until the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Nov. 1 that counties should not count the ballots if they were missing a date. The court defined an incorrectly dated ballot as one that fell outside of the time range for acceptable ballots, Sept. 19 through Nov. 8, 2022, the first day mail ballots were sent out through the day of the election.In practice, this has often led to counties rejecting ballots that they know were cast in the correct time period.Roughly 8,000 ballots were rejected during the 2022 midterm election for lacking a proper date or signature on the outer return envelope, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State.A Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis of data from three counties in 2022 — Philadelphia, Allegheny, and Erie — found voters submitting the flawed ballots were more likely to come from communities with higher than average non-white populations compared with the overall voting population in the county.The department began being able to track rejections specifically for dating issues in 2023, and said in last November’s election the issue accounted for roughly 2,500 rejections.Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at [email protected].
03/28/2024 --rollcall
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman is pictured near the stairs to the Senate floor in the Capitol on June 13, 2010. The former Connecticut Democratic senator died Wednesday at the age of 82.
03/28/2024 --rollcall
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman is pictured near the stairs to the Senate floor in the Capitol on June 13, 2010. The former Connecticut Democratic senator died Wednesday at the age of 82.
03/27/2024 --rollcall
Former Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman talks with reporters as he walks through the Senate subway in Washington on June 22, 2021.
03/17/2024 --rollcall
Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., speaks about Republicans abandoning the bipartisan border deal during a Feb. 6 press conference.
03/17/2024 --rollcall
Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., speaks about Republicans abandoning the bipartisan border deal during a Feb. 6 press conference.
03/15/2024 --variety
That’s a wrap on Oscar season 2024 — but first, the Variety Awards Circuit Podcast’s Roundtable dives in one last time to take a final look at the highs, lows and head scratchers from Sunday night’s ceremony. “Oppenheimer” did huge, but it didn’t quite sweep. “Poor Things” over-poor-formed. (Sorry, this is the Roundtable, so dad […]
03/14/2024 --rollcall
Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., right, and Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., attend a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Jan. 25.
03/11/2024 --nypost
NY Post readers discuss an investigation after firefighters booed NY Attorney General Letitia James at a ceremony.
03/11/2024 --variety
With the 2024 Academy Awards in the books, Variety is celebrating the Oscar wins of the stars and filmmaking talent that took home gold at the ceremony Sunday evening. Many of the night’s biggest winners graced the cover of Variety, guested on the Awards Circuit podcast and featured in the Actors on Actors series throughout […]
03/11/2024 --variety
The Academy Awards unfolded pretty much as expected, with “Oppenheimer” dominating, and the only real shocks coming in the — wait, there weren’t any huge ones, actually. As predicted, “Oppenheimer” steamrolled, getting seven Oscars in total. It won the top prize for picture, as well as Christopher Nolan winning for director, Cillian Murphy for actor and […]
03/11/2024 --variety
Robert Downey Jr. has won the Oscar for best supporting actor for his work in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” The night completed an awards season sweep for the star, with his victory at the Oscars joining his previous supporting actor wins at the Golden Globes, Critic’s Choice Awards, SAG Awards and BAFTA Film Awards. “I’d like […]
03/11/2024 --variety
Robert Downey Jr. has won the Oscar for best supporting actor for his work in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” The night completed an awards season sweep for the star, with his victory at the Oscars joining his previous supporting actor wins at the Golden Globes, Critic’s Choice Awards, SAG Awards and BAFTA Film Awards. “I’d like […]
03/10/2024 --variety
Put on your pinkest “Barbie” dress or grayest “Oppenheimer” suit, because the 2024 Oscars are finally here. Hosted by Jimmy Kimmel for the second year in a row, the 96th Academy Awards are honoring the top movies from 2023, with Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” leading the pack with 13 nominations. Stars Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and […]
03/09/2024 --variety
We’re less than 24 hours from Hollywood’s biggest night, and if you haven’t filled out your office or household Oscar pool, time is running out. But first — check out this week’s Variety Awards Circuit Podcast for some final analysis. Awards guru Clayton Davis, along with Jenelle Riley, Jazz Tangcay and Michael Schneider recorded a […]
03/08/2024 --rollcall
Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., is halfway to the finish line on this year's overdue spending bills.
03/08/2024 --variety
What Oscar records will be broken and which ones will remain intact at the 96th Academy Awards ceremony March 10. With a win, Billie Eilish, 22, and Finneas, 26, would become the youngest artists ever to win two Oscars before the age of 30. The pair won for James Bond theme “No Time to Die” […]
03/07/2024 --rollcall
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who will give up his leadership post at the end of this Congress, is a staunch internationalist in a party that is focusing more on domestic issues.
03/06/2024 --rollcall
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., conducts a news conference with members of the House Republican Conference on Wednesday.
03/01/2024 --theguardian
Labor highlights tax changes and legacy of late MP Peta Murphy, while Liberals’ Nathan Conroy tells ‘scared’ voters to ‘send a message’ to government on law and orderFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastAccording to Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese, the battle for Dunkley will either come down to law and order, or tax cuts and the legacy of the late MP Peta Murphy.As the tight race to win Saturday’s byelection turned to a sprint, the two leaders descended on Frankston to make their final pitches to voters on Friday – though neither would admit that its political importance goes well beyond Melbourne’s south-eastern fringe.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading...
02/29/2024 --rollcall
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., leaves the Capitol after the House voted to keep the government funded into March on Jan. 18. That was the third stopgap measure of the current fiscal year; Thursday's vote is on the fourth.
 
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