A U.S. Senator is without a home.
At least for now, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy does not have property in our state that he can call his own.
Yet he still represents Connecticut and does not expect that to change anytime soon.
This is not without precedent. It has happened before but does not happen often.
Senator Murphy explained this week how he got to this point.
“We sold our house in Cheshire to try to get a little closer to family. We sold it a little bit faster than we thought and so we’re looking for a new place,” he said.
Senator Murphy said his family spent the majority of its time in Old Lyme at his parents’ home since selling his home in Cheshire.
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He now has property in Washington, D.C., where he, his wife and young children live, however, ”I’ve lived in Connecticut all my life. My parents grew up here. I plan to live in Connecticut the rest of my life. This is obviously a really, really special place to me and my family,” he said.
Just a few years ago, the Congressional Research Service filed a report on qualifications for members of Congress.
It said the constitution requires them to be “inhabitants” of the district or state they represent only at the time of election.
We found a bunch of other cases just in the past similar to Senator Murphy’s.
There have been accounts of members of Congress on both sides of the political aisle who have listed their parents’ homes in their home states as their primary residences and one who simply lived in hotels when he returned to his district.
