Murphy will not return to Senate next week after stroke
The senator, who has been mentioned as a possible 2028 presidential candidate, is the latest lawmaker whose health issues have kept them from the Capitol this year.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), who had a stroke last weekend, does not plan to return to the Senate next week for a postelection session, his office said Friday, announcing that he will spend several weeks recovering at a rehabilitation center.
In a statement, Murphy, 53, said he had been discharged from the hospital and was “working towards a full recovery.”
“The doctors are very encouraged by the progress I’ve made so far,” Murphy said. “In order to take my recovery seriously and get back to work on the quickest timeline possible, I will be spending several weeks at a rehabilitation center after being discharged from the hospital today.”
The senator’s statement did not make clear when he expected to return to the Capitol. Murphy’s office did not provide more detail about his condition.
While attending his son’s hockey game Oct. 31, Murphy experienced numbness in his arm, called 911, and was taken to a nearby hospital, where doctors diagnosed a stroke. In his statement Friday, he said he had been “diagnosed with a small bleed in the thalamus region of my brain.”
The senator, who has been mentioned as a possible 2028 presidential candidate, is the latest lawmaker whose health issues have kept them from the Capitol this year. His absence comes as his party is preparing to take control of the Senate, and as Republicans weigh what priorities they can advance in their final weeks in power.
A vocal critic of President Donald Trump who has become prominent on television, Murphy traveled across the country last month, appearing with Democratic candidates to try to help them get elected. He had been hospitalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore since the stroke.
His illness comes as politicians are facing greater scrutiny over the amount of information they share with the public about their health. Murphy has not been photographed or recorded since his stroke, and while members of his team have maintained that he is recovering, they have declined to share any specific information.
Jose Suarez, director of the neurocritical care division at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was quoted in the statement saying that the senator had a “small hemorrhagic stroke,” but “has shown tremendous progress, and at the current rate of improvement, we expect that he will make a full recovery following rehabilitation.”
Earlier this year, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) spent more than three months absent from the Capitol after a fall at his home. The 84-year-old’s absence provoked a storm of speculation given that his office waited about a month to release details of his condition and kept him out of the public eye during his lengthy convalescence, releasing no video footage that would show the state of his health.
Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R., N.J._, who just lost his reelection bid, disappeared from the public eye for more than 100 days this year with no explanation. When he returned to work in June, he said he had been hospitalized for depression.
Besides Murphy, at least three sitting senators have had strokes in the past several years. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D., N.M.) was gone from the Capitol for five weeks after a stroke at the beginning of 2022.
Months later, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) spent a week in the hospital after what he called a “minor stroke.” Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) nearly died from a stroke just days before his primary in 2022 in what was one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
