Chris Murphy

We are failing in many ways to live up to that promise for America's families.

I believe that the strength of our middle class has long been a key aspect of our international appeal.

I would respectfully disagree that the debt is not a crisis. It is a major crisis.

The most important thing that we can do is to pass a multiyear assistance commitment to Ukraine.

We are just playing a dangerous game of chicken here, which is at some point their reserves run out.

I worry that onerous conditions upon our aid and the IMF's decision to do the same thing in some way plays into the hands of Russia.

The worst mistake we could make is to concede that Russia's policy in Syria is tied to our sanctions regime in Ukraine.

I think there is no doubt that there is a connection in Russia's mind between their policy in Syria and their policy in Ukraine.

Crimea sanctions must remain in place so long as the Kremlin imposes its will.

We will keep working with Ukraine to do its part to implement Minsk.

2016 could be a turning point year for Ukraine.

This small investment that we make at the Federal level saves an awful lot of money to the taxpayer at the State level.

Thank you very much for your visit to Connecticut about a month ago.

We were building about 500 new units out of 811 with Federal dollars when I came to Congress, in part because of legislation that I helped write, where now, over the last 3 years, we built 7,500 units with Federal dollars

This small investment that we make at the Federal level saves an awful lot of money to the taxpayer at the State level.

But this year's budget, I think, flat funds 811.

I just want to thank you personally for your work, for your focus on many of our shared priorities.

States like ours are just in tremendous budget crunches, in part because, when you don't properly house these individuals, the cost of inappropriate care, where it--be in emergency rooms or prisons, gets passed largely down to State…

In the time that I have remaining, just wanted to talk to you about the Section 811 Supportive Housing program, what a tremendous success that program has been over the course of the last 3 years.

The damage to the overall Federal Treasury, in the lost jobs, the lost tax revenue, the increased Medicaid costs, the increased unemployment costs, pretty quickly wipes out the savings to the agency.

This sort of has been a cause and crusade of mine for years, to put some teeth back into our Buy America requirements.

So I understand the difficult tradeoffs you have to make, but we should all be cognizant of the consequences to U.S. national security.

Just as an example, one of those tradeoffs is that the World Food Program in and around Syria is cutting off aid to refugee families that do not live in the actual refugee camps.

But it is also a consequence of your very successful integration of mental health services with physical help services that has allowed us to make those great gains.

We certainly have an interest in growing a domestic aquaculture industry