“There was a time in which they had to make a decision, dealing with me and reducing the debt ceiling or giving pork and subsidies to Alaska. They chose to add more pork and subsidies for Alaska to secure that.”
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on why Senator Murkowski flipped her vote to allow passage of the Trump budget bill
The scene when a NBC reporter catches up to Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in the corridor and asks her for her reaction to Senator Rand Paul essentially calling her out for caving once she’d extracted concessions for Alaska at the expense of every other state is simultaneously amazing as well as awesomely awkward.
She mutters “oh, my God!” in disgust before staring at the reporter for about ten seconds in silence before she gives her seething response which we will pick apart in this deep dive.
In fairness, she’d just been put through the gauntlet of a record “vote-a-rama” on the Senate’s version of President Trump’s utterly evil reverse Robin Hood bill that will gift massive tax breaks to the wealthy whilst the poor get kicked off Medicaid and have food taken from them and if that’s not enough of a kick in the sensitive regions…the poorest will also end up paying more in tax overall.
The House version was horrific enough and true to form, the Senate actually made it even worse with even bigger cuts to Medicaid! If this thing ends up being signed into law, there is absolutely no way the Democrats don’t flip the House in 2026 if not flip a few seats in the Senate as well unless the Democratic National Committee employs the same failed strategies in the recent past and snatches defeat from near certain victory.
All they have to do is tie every evil provision of this legislation like a noose round the necks of every Republican who dared to vote for it and lay every missed meal and needless suffering and death due to lack of healthcare in their constituency right at their feet.
Senator Murkowski surely knows this is coming. You could certainly see the exasperation and exhaustion and that’s what I believed led to her being unintentionally too honest as well as completely tone-deaf in her reply.
She knows Senator Paul has got her dead to rights and what follows is probably the second worst attempt at trying to talk their way out of a horrible political decision when it comes to this bill.
As much as what she said will certainly horrify her PR team, I can safely say that Senator Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) reply to the observation that Medicaid cuts will likely kill people that “we’re all going to die” and then her sarcastic follow-up double-down video which was even more ill judged ranks as the single stupidest thing said in this Congress amongst quite an impressive amount of competition.
“My response is I have an obligation to the people of the state of Alaska, and I live up to that every single day.”
Senator Murkowski
Fair point…they’re the ones who actually cast ballots to send her to the World’s Pre-Eminent Talking ShoppeTM on her side of the Capitol building.
And it is right and proper that she should look out for the interests of her constituents.
Lord knows I’ve dared to dream that Senator Thom Tillis the Chicken-Hearted and Senator Preparation Budd might have deigned to bother listening to and actually following the directions of the majority of North Carolinians who are diametrically opposed to pretty much everything they’ve been doing since their election and I’ve excoriated Senator Tillis in this blog many times when he’s proved himself less than the Tarheel ideal.
But let me offer a small counterpoint which illustrates the tightrope every Senator must negotiate whilst in office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Oath of Office – United States Senate
I do plan on sending a copy of this to Senator Murkowski and I’d dearly love for her to identify where she sees the word “Alaska” in that oath of office she took upon arrival and presentation of her credentials to the Senate.
Take all the time you need…
“Do I like this bill? No. Because I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests, but I know that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don’t like that. I don’t like the fact that we moved through an artificial deadline, an artificial timeline, to produce something—to meet a deadline rather than to actually try to produce the best bill for the country. But when I saw the direction that this is going—you know, you can either say, ‘I don’t like it,’ and not try to help my state, or you can roll up your sleeves.”
Senator Murkowski
“Many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill” seems an absurd understatement of the problem the rest of the country that didn’t get pork thrown their way to get a bill passed that by all rights should have never made it past the stage of “informal proposal” much less “damaging legislation with a better than average chance of becoming law”!
But the point I’m trying to make is that whilst it’s perfectly acceptable to advocate for your state’s interests as those are the voters who allow you to warm that cushy seat of yours, there will always be a tension between their much narrower and parochial interests and the interests of the nation.
Your oath should have been a clear clue which one is supposed to win when those interests come into conflict as they did in this bill!
Even though most of the rest of the country thought it absolute madness in 1867 when then Secretary of State William Seward paid Russia the princely sum of $7.2M for the Alaska territory, I do believe that history has vindicated the decision that would eventually lead to the accession of our 49th state.
We’ve been together through thick and thin, through many wars and natural disasters. The rest of us didn’t throw Alaska to the wolves (animals which I’d imagine you’d be fairly familiar with given the enormous beautiful wilderness in Alaska) when a drunken tanker captain dumped millions of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound or turned our backs when a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck near Anchorage and any number of challenges faced by our most northerly of citizens.
Alaskans have been our friends and neighbours for well over a century and so it seems rather disappointing that friendship rather came to naught when it was an opportunity for one of their Senators to help save the rest of the country from this legislation that will enrich the wealthiest Americans (the vast majority of whom are not from Alaska) and simultaneously cut healthcare and food support from the poorest and most vulnerable Americans.
But, let’s not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution. While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it.
My sincere hope is that this is not the final product. This bill needs more work across chambers and is not ready for the President’s desk. We need to work together to get this right.
Senator Murkowski – Facebook post
Senator Murkowski, can we have a moment where you join us in the real world as opposed to that Fantasyland inside the Capital Beltway?
With your years of experience in Washington, can you truly tell the American people with a straight face that you genuinely believed when you gave the vote that enabled VP Vance to cast the tie-breaking vote that sent the bill back to the House that there is a snowball’s (another object you should be reasonably familiar with!) chance in the infernal regions that the Senate will be allowed another chance at voting on this bill?
Take it away, boys…
If we accept you at your word that you were sincere in admitting all of you know that this legislation totally sucks for pretty much every other state and territory and you really wanted more time to craft theoretically better legislation in spite of the same individuals that crafted the first two heinous versions of it likely being involved in this hypothetically better bill…then why in the name of any deity you’d care to name would you have ALLOWED THIS BILL TO PROGRESS hoping that the House of Representatives would bail the Senate out of a bad policy they’re allowing to happen?!?
I don’t know about you but when the wolf is coming at my throat with fangs bared, I’m more inclined to trust myself to actually deal with the wolf on a rather permanent basis rather than give it another shot at “not advantaging” my desire to remain amongst the living!
I get it that you’re probably being threatened with a primary opponent financed by at least one if not both of the mad billionaires that are fighting over control of our government even though you’re not due to stand for re-election until 2028.
But as we’ve seen, even though Elon Musk’s money bought Trump’s second term in the White House, it wasn’t enough to swing a judicial election in Wisconsin that the Republicans were the odds-on favourites to win had he kept out of the race. You also rather famously won a write-in campaign in 2010 and have been fighting primary opponents ever since so is that really the threat to your position you think it is?
I think not.
But even if it is, there are some times that it’s preferable to go down fighting than meekly accept one’s fate and chicken out of the contest as Senator Tillis has done by announcing his retirement and not facing the music for his egregious votes in 2026.
That’s why Senator McCain is rightfully lauded as a hero for making his way down the stairs and giving a literal thumbs down to the Senate’s attempt at killing the Affordable Care Act (a flawed act to be sure but some insurance is better than what this current bill is offering the country!) after having had BRAIN SURGERY and in spite of the GOP caucus working on him something fierce to toe the party line.
Choosing to allow this bill to proceed after the appearance of being bribed with pork and carve-outs for Alaska is why you’re not going to get a similar reaction from the American people. It may not seem fair but that’s the reality of the difference between a courageous stand and cravenly cowering to the demands of the party.
“Kill it, and the provisions that are going to be very helpful for economic development in my state would no longer be available.”
Senator Murkowski
Is that truly the case?
Whilst I’ve no doubt that the Republican leadership on both sides of the Capitol are capable of such vindictiveness, they have to know that if they needed to bribe you with pork to buy your vote this time that they’re likely to need it for any subsequent attempts whether it’s another bite of the apple by the Senate (which we know is unlikely to happen because the House does not and cannot trust the Senate and never has!) or scrapping this current bill.
They’re not going to want to go completely out of their way to publicly piss off the one person who has just shown she’s the deciding vote for anything in the Senate and she can be bought.
If you’re being honest with yourself, even with the bribes of pork that bought your vote is still a lousy deal for Alaskans as well.
It may well have put a band-aid over some of the most punitive aspects of the cuts to the social safety net that a significant portion of Alaskans depend up to just survive in a harsh environment few in the Lower 48 could ever imagine.
The plain truth is that many Alaskans are going to be stripped of their healthcare and food assistance even with the concessions you’ve wrung from the leadership.
Those people are going to have two choices as to how they proceed should they fall ill and require health care:
- They could just accept their lot as expendable and not bother going to hospital or the doctor and wait to die.
- They can turn up at the emergency room of whatever hospital they can get to (assuming the hospital is still standing which is by no means guaranteed) knowing that EMTALA requires them to be treated and stabilised.
The vast majority of people are going to choose the second option whether they have insurance or the ability to pay or not. And if they don’t pay, those costs get dumped onto those fortunate to actually have health insurance or the taxpayers in the form of fraudulent accounting by hospitals and medical providers or when those hospitals require bailouts by public funds to keep their doors open.
And all that for “economic development” and especially tax cuts that the only the very wealthy will see an appreciable benefit. Last time I checked, Alaska has *ZERO* resident billionaires and is near the foot of the table with only 22,302 millionaires out of 267,865 total households as of 2023.
That doesn’t seem to be an awesome return on investment for a vote that sold out the rest of the country should this hideous legislation somehow make it out of the Congress and to the President’s desk.
A President I might add that is apparently completely unaware that the three things he knew were politically toxic to cut being Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security are all being gutted in this bill he is so proud of. That is not particularly reassuring to the rest of us who are left wondering what in the heck you people are smoking up there in Washington DC.
So there you are and I know you’d like to see yourself as the victim in a process that was ill-conceived, artificially rushed through, and ruinously damaging to the vast majority of American citizens.
You aren’t the victim here.
We are.
I can only hope this will be a learning experience for you that courage often requires sacrifice which is infinitely preferable than making the American people *THE* sacrifice.
There’s a reason I mentioned Senator McCain above because if I recall correctly, the person he looked toward and gave a wink and a hint of a smile as that thumb of his turned downward to put the final nail into the coffin of the “skinny repeal” of the Affordable care Act was…YOU. Someone who had voted with him and Senator Collins to not strip millions of Americans of hard-won insurance cover, even as flawed as the ACA was and arguably still is.
Maybe you might remember the Senator Murkowski who was set upon by her colleagues to switch her vote with the same tactics that were successful on this bill:
“Let’s just say that they do something that’s so Alaska-specific just to quote, ‘get me’. Then you have a nationwide system that doesn’t work. That then comes crashing down and Alaska’s not able to kind of keep it together on its own.”
Senator Murkowski on pressure to cast deciding vote to repeal the ACA
That Senator Murkowski seemed like a real stand-up kind of person. You might want to go find her so that the next time a “McCain Moment” comes your way, you’ll be ready and willing to do what you know is right and honour your oath to preserve, protect and the defend the Constitution for all Americans, not just the ones whose votes you need to stay in office.