Murray hopes to be role model for more effective Congress

While the senator is stepping away from her official position in party leadership, in which she has helped craft Senate Democrats’ messaging, she figures to remain a key player in communicating her party’s priorities as head of the Appropriations panel. When her constituents hear about the money the federal government spends, Murray said, she knows many of them think, “Why are we doing it?”

“We’re doing it so that your kids get a public education,” she said. “We’re doing it so that our wheat farmers, if they suffer losses, have the capability to remain wheat farmers. We’re doing it so that our ports have the infrastructure that we need, so products can come in and they can get across the country. I mean, everything we do has a purpose. We’re not very good at communicating those purposes, and I see this as a real opportunity to do that.”

Murray, who won a sixth term in office in November, said she knew when she first got to the Senate in 1993 that she wanted one of the highly sought-after seats on the Appropriations Committee, which are seldom given to freshmen. When she met with the late Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat who then chaired the panel, to ask for a seat, Murray recalled that Byrd asked her how she intended to vote on a bill that would let a president remove specific line items from a spending bill.

While she had publicly opposed the line-item veto during her campaign, agreeing with Byrd’s position, Murray recalled thinking, “That is not how you should get things done,” and she said she told Byrd as much.

“I got the drift, you know,” Murray said. “And I felt that power was not how we should legislate.”