Transcript: Sen. Chris Murphy on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” March 1, 2026
The following is the text of the interview with Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on March 1, 2026.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Joining us now is Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, good morning.
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: Hello.
MARGARET BRENNAN: He asked Congress to go back to Washington and vote on whether to try to stop 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 calling for war with Iran. As in previous months, no one in this country was asking for war with Venezuela. This President is cutting our economy on purpose. He is the most corrupt president in our nation’s history, and the American people want him to focus on problems at home. Instead, he’s busy getting us into overseas tunnels that have become dangerous for American soldiers. This is a disaster. It is illegal, and the President is obligated under the Constitution to come to Congress and ask for military authorization. He wouldn’t get that approval if he asked for it. Congress won’t vote to give him permission to do it, but he’s bound to come to Congress.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The administration would argue Venezuela was a limited military operation. You see- They haven’t explained 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 conflict until peace is found. He uses the word war. Do you consider this a war?
SEN. MURPHY: Well, we’re busy with ongoing military strikes, which have killed American soldiers with the intention of regime change. If that’s not war, what is? Now, the president said the goal is regime change, and the goal is to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program and their nuclear program. He will not succeed in any of those efforts. His intelligence agencies have already told him that the likely outcome is that hard-line members of the IRGC will take over the existing leadership. So we will not get democracy. We will get a very bad Iranian leadership. We already know that you cannot blow up their nuclear program. He told us last year that he had canceled the show, and apparently, within the last year, they were back within a week. So we’re going to have Americans dying, and the result is going to be strong leadership going on in Iran and not getting rid of their nuclear program. That is a moral and strategic disaster.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, you’re summarizing the administration’s views perhaps more succinctly than they’ve received, because we’ve never heard a clear public accounting of the state of their nuclear program. Rubio said they were not advising, Witkoff said otherwise. But I want to ask you about something about the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where you live, the State Department issued a global warning to all Americans. They have formed a task force that they say will try to figure out how to help Americans trapped in the Middle East and around the world. But the US embassy in Israel said it was closed and would not be able to help with the evacuation. If you are 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 is no secret that this administration has no plan for the ongoing chaos in the Middle East. Those scenes you showed at the beginning of the show are scary. Violence is not confined to the Middle East. It spills over into Pakistan and other countries of the world, and it is no secret that our partners in the region, apart from the relevant government in Israel, had urged us not to take this step, because they knew that the spillover, which now looks like a regional conflict, was a possible result. So again, what do we get from this? We don’t get government reforms to democracy. We will not end their nuclear program. We will have an outbreak of regional war. It will not be the billionaire children of Donald Trump and his mortal friends. It will be the children of the middle class and poor families all over this country who will die in a war of choice, a war in vain, an illegal war.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, we’re hoping that we’re going to be given more information to Congress or to talk to the media to explain some of these things. If we are talking about Americans though in the world right now. There are also FBI and homeland security concerns about cyber vulnerabilities and potential threats to infrastructure, they are issuing warnings about this. Given the current situation, Republicans are asking Democrats to consider suspending the position they have taken, which is to freeze some funding for Homeland Security. Do you feel that you need to reconsider this position?
SEN. MURPHY: So the Republicans are saying that because they started an illegal, disastrous war on Iran, we should give them permission to continue using ICE to kill American citizens, to allow them to fund tear gas schools? No, we need to stand up to American citizens that ICE is killing, terrorizing children. They must stop this illegal war, and they must stop ICE from terrorizing our communities. We must forcefully seek both of these things.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The administration will say that they have restructured the way they make policies within DHS.
SEN. MURPHY: They have, they haven’t. I mean, just because the rest of the world’s and the nation’s attention has turned away from Minneapolis, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still brutal American citizens. We just found out last week that they left a Burmese immigrant dead, five kilometers from them, blind and disabled, this cruelty is still going on in this country. We can do two things at once. We can demand that ICE stop killing American citizens, and we can demand that the administration not send our children to die in a war we don’t need.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you believe that with the current funding Homeland Security is able to adequately protect the homeland? That’s what I hear you say.
SEN. MURPHY: Listen, I believe that the administration must commit to legally enforcing the laws of this nation. I have no responsibility to support the Department of Homeland Security that breaks the law every day, just as I have no responsibility to support this illegal war either.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So three weeks and counting, it feels like the standoff isn’t over?
SEN. MURPHY: Well, if they agree to first follow the law at the Department of Homeland Security, they’ll get the votes right away. But listen, this is what people want. People want ICE to start behaving legally, and they don’t want wars overseas. So I think this is a clear case of my Democrats and the American people when it comes to domestic issues and global issues.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So back to Iran. If there had been a forum, if there had been full disclosure of the status of the negotiations or the testing of Iran’s nuclear program, would the Democrats be able to support the war? I ask that because the Biden administration first reached out to Iran to try to reach a negotiated agreement, but they couldn’t get one. Partly because they weren’t willing to lift sanctions on the IRGC, so, in other words, are we at a point where military conflict or conflict was inevitable, and it just happened on Donald Trump’s watch?
SEN. MURPHY: No. Donald Trump introduced this problem, didn’t he? He inherited the nuclear deal in effect, which had given Iran more than a year to develop a nuclear weapon–
MARGARET BRENNAN: –The JCPOA.
SEN. MURPHY: The JCPOA. Against the advice of his advisers, he rejected that agreement, which has brought us to this moment.
MARGARET BRENNAN: It’s out of date now.
SEN. MURPHY: And there, but I think Iran would really like to extend those provisions if we were still in the deal. But secondly, there is no history, no experience that shows that the air campaign alone will lead to a positive change in the regime. In fact, there is not a single example of it in all of American history. An air campaign without at least the threat of a land attack, which the administration issues, never results in the rebirth of democracy in an authoritarian country. So the plan they put in place, a continuous air attack without a ground attack, will fail. All of that will happen at the end of this, probably, listen, I’m fighting for democracy in Iran, but the most likely outcome here is that the hardliners take over the government. They restarted their missile program, restarted their nuclear program, and we’re just back to bombing and putting American lives and regional health at risk again in a year or two.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Right. Senator Murphy, thank you. Thanks for your time this morning, and we’ll be back with more Face the Nation. Stay with us.
