The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution introduced by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy to block a small part of the massive arms sale the Trump administration has agreed to with Saudi Arabia.
The measure would nix about $500 million worth of the $110 billion deal, relating to precision-guided missiles that the Saudis are using to bomb their neighbors in Yemen.
Speaking on WNPR’s Where We Live, Murphy said the Saudis’ intervention in the Yemeni civil war is causing a human rights crisis.
“It has created a famine in Yemen. There are eight million people on the brink of starvation. We just crossed 100,000 cholera cases,” he said. “And the U.S. has been supplying the Saudis for their bombing campaign. The U.S. is participating in this bombing campaign, which is creating a humanitarian nightmare inside Yemen.”
Murphy has jointly sponsored the resolution alongside Republican Senator Rand Paul. Murphy said the reality in the U.S. Senate is that work is still going on across party lines, despite the extreme partisanship of the Trump era.
“Politics will always involve some head butting,” Murphy said. “But what’s happening in reality is never what you’re seeing on TV. What you’re seeing on TV, what you’re seeing on the internet, is in some ways a fictionalized version of reality. Today it is more partisan than it was in 2016, but there is still cooperation that happens.”
The vote on the Saudi deal is expected to be the first debate on foreign policy in the Senate this year, and Murphy expects it to be very close.
