Tim Murphy Resigns From Congress
The anti-abortion Republican Congressman who cheated on his wife and then asked his girlfriend to have an abortion after she told him she was pregnant, has resigned.
Representative Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania quietly announced he was quitting in a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan.
"It was Dr. Murphy's decision to move on to the next chapter of his life, and I support it," Ryan said in a statement, adding that Murphy would stay on until October 21. He had initially announced only that he would not run for re-election.
Trouble for Murphy began in September when news of his extramarital affair broke out. He stayed in Congress, and stayed with his wife, until last week when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained a series of documents that showed that he was not only lying to his wife about his affair, but he was also lying to the American people about his position on abortion.
On January 25, text messages the Post-Gazette received showed that messages were sent from Murphy’s cell phone number asking his girlfriend, Shannon Edwards, to get an abortion. It's unclear who leaked the text messages to the paper, but Edwards clearly was not pleased.
"You have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options," Edwards, a forensic psychologist in Pittsburgh, wrote Murphy.
Murphy responded by telling Edwards that it’s OK to be anti-abortion at work and have completely different stances in his personal life since he doesn’t really mean it.
"I get what you say about my March for life messages,” he texted to Edwards. “I've never written them. Staff does them. I read them and winced. I told staff don't write anymore. I will."
Murphy was an anti-abortion congressman who co-sponsored the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act that would ban 20-week abortions. It passed the House on Tuesday and was was still endorsed by LifePAC and the Family Research Council.
“Last year, I became involved in an affair with a personal friend,” Murphy said in a public statement last year after he publicly admitted to the affair. “This is nobody’s fault but my own, and I offer no excuses. To the extent that there should be any blame in this matter, it falls solely upon me.”
Furthermore, a June memo written by Murphy's chief of staff, Susan Mosychuk, said there had been an "ongoing and ever more pronounced pattern of sustained inappropriate behavior" from Murphy, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The Post-Gazette wrote that the memo criticized his "inability to hire and retain competent staff, abysmal office morale," as well as "hostile, erratic, unstable, angry, aggressive and abusive behavior." His office has had an almost 100 percent staff turnover this year.
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