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Russian (RU) The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on March 1, 2026.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Joining us now is Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, good morning.
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: Good morning.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You have called for Congress to return to Washington and to vote on whether to try to essentially halt this military action. No War Powers Resolution has ever overcome a presidential veto. Why do you think you need to take one?
SEN. MURPHY: Well, nobody in this country is asking for war with Iran. Just like months ago, no one in this country was asking for war with Venezuela. This President is intentionally tanking our economy. He's the most corrupt president in the history of our nation, and Americans want him to focus on the crises here at home. Instead, he is busy getting us involved in quagmires overseas that already are becoming deadly to American soldiers. This is a disaster. It is illegal, and the President is obligated under the Constitution to come to Congress and ask for an authorization of military force. He wouldn't get that authorization if he asked for it. Congress wouldn't vote to give him the permission to do it, but he's obligated to come to Congress.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The administration would argue Venezuela was a limited military operation. They see- They're not explaining to the public yet, beyond that Twitter video, exactly what the plan is here, but the President has tweeted, in a way, describing this as an open ended conflict until peace is achieved. You are using the term war. You do consider this to be a war?
SEN. MURPHY: Oh, of course, we are engaged in regular, ongoing military strikes that have, that has already killed American soldiers with the goal of regime change. If that is not war, what is? Now, the president has said that the goal is regime change, and the goal is to eliminate Iran's missile program and their nuclear program. He is not going to succeed in either of those endeavors. His intelligence agencies have already told him that the most likely outcome is that hardline members of the IRGC replace the current leadership. So we're not going to get a democracy. We're going to get an even worse Iranian leadership. We already know that you can't bomb their nuclear program out of existence. He told us last year that he had obliterated the program, and then apparently, over the course of the last year, they had gotten back to within a week. So we're going to have Americans dying, and the end result is going to be hard line leadership continues in Iran and we don't get rid of their nuclear program. That's a moral and strategic disaster for the country.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, you're summarizing the administration's views in perhaps a more succinct way than they have, because we haven't even heard a clear public accounting of the state of their nuclear program. Rubio said they weren't enriching, Witkoff said something else. But I want to ask you about something in regard to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where you sit, the State Department has issued a worldwide caution alert to all Americans. They have set up a task force that they say they're going to try to figure out how to help the Americans who are trapped in the Middle East and throughout the world. But the US embassy in Israel said they're closed and they can't help evacuate. If you're an American abroad or a family member, what should you be doing right now?
SEN. MURPHY: Well, I think you can call your member of Congress or your senator. We will do whatever we can to help. But it's no secret that this administration has no plan for the chaos that is unfolding right now in the Middle East. Those scenes that you showed at the beginning of the program are frightening. Violence is not contained just to the Middle East. It's spilling over into Pakistan and other parts of the world, and it's no secret that our allies in the region, with the exception of the right wing government in Israel, had begged us not to take this action, because they knew that the spillover, which is now looking like regional conflict, was the likely outcome. So again, what are we getting out of this? We're not getting regime change to a democracy. We're not going to eliminate their nuclear program. We are going to have regional war breaking out. It won't be the billionaire kids of Donald Trump and his buddies that die. It's going to be the children of middle class and poor families all across this country who are going to die for a war of choice, a war of vanity, an illegal war.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, we are going to hope for more briefings to Congress or engagement with the press to explain some of these things. When we are talking about the Americans though around the world right now. There's also from the FBI and homeland security concern about cyber vulnerabilities and potential threats to infrastructure, they put out alerts about this. Given the current situation, Republicans are calling on Democrats to consider stopping the position you've taken, which is to halt some funding to Homeland Security. Do you feel you need to reconsider this position?
SEN. MURPHY: So the Republicans are saying that because they launched an illegal, disastrous war in Iran, we should give them permission to continue using ICE to murder American citizens, to allow them to get the funding to tear gas schools? No, we need to stand up for the American citizens that ICE is murdering, the kids that they are terrorizing. They should stop this illegal war, and they should stop ICE from terrorizing our communities. We should demand that they do both things.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The administration would say they have adjusted some of the way they're carrying out policies within DHS.
SEN. MURPHY: They have, they have not. I mean, just because some of the world's and the nation's attention has turned away from Minneapolis, that doesn't mean that they aren't still brutalizing American citizens. We just discovered last week that they had left a Burmese immigrant for dead, five miles from his home, blind and disabled, this brutality is continuing in the country. We can do two things at once. We can demand that ICE stop murdering American citizens, and we can demand that the administration not send our kids to die for a war that we don't need.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you believe that with the current funding Homeland Security has that they are able to protect the homeland in an adequate fashion? That's what I hear you saying.
SEN. MURPHY: Listen, I believe that the administration should make a commitment to legally prosecuting the laws of this nation. I don't have any obligation to fund a Department of Homeland Security that is violating the law every day, just like I don't have any obligation to support this war that is illegal as well.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So three weeks and counting, it sounds like the standoff is not ending?
SEN. MURPHY: Well, if they agree to start adhering to the law at the Department of Homeland Security, they'll have the votes immediately. But listen, this is what the people want. The people want ICE to start behaving legally, and they don't want wars overseas. So I think this is a pretty clear case of Democrats standing with the American people when it comes to domestic crises and international crises.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So back on Iran. If there had been a briefing, if there had been full disclosure of the state of negotiations or an assessment of Iran's nuclear program, would Democrats have been persuadable to support military action? I ask that because the Biden administration initially had reached out to Iran to try to get to a negotiated deal, and they weren't able to get one. In part because they weren't willing to lift sanctions off of the IRGC so, in other words, are we just in a place where military conflict or confrontation was inevitable, and it just happened to land on Donald Trump's watch?
SEN. MURPHY: No. Donald Trump precipitated this crisis, right? He inherited a nuclear agreement that was working, that had put Iran more than a year away from a nuclear weapon--
MARGARET BRENNAN: --The JCPOA.
SEN. MURPHY: The JCPOA. Against the advice of his advisers, he tossed that agreement out, which brought us to this moment.
MARGARET BRENNAN: It would have expired by now.
SEN. MURPHY: And there- right, but I think Iran would have certainly been willing to extend those provisions if we were still in the agreement. But second, there is no history, there is no experience that shows an air campaign alone will result in positive regime change. In fact, there's not a single example of it in the entirety of American history. An air campaign without at least the threat of a ground invasion, which the administration is ruling out, never results in a democratic rebirth in an authoritarian country. So the plan they have laid out, sustained air strikes without a ground invasion, is destined to fail. All that will happen at the end of this, most likely, listen, I'm rooting for democracy in Iran, but the most likely outcome here is that hard liners take over the government. They restart their missile program, they restart their nuclear program, and we're just right back at bombing them again and putting American lives and regional lives at risk again in a year or two.
MARGARET BRENNAN: All right. Senator Murphy, thank you. Thank you for your time this morning, and we'll be right back with a lot more Face the Nation. Stay with us.
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