Sen. Murkowski Discovers Trump Will Lie and Betray Her

Fool me once...

(Sen. Murkowski looking “agonized” about her vote. Image credit: Bill Clark // CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

---

[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. If you have suggestions or feedback on how I can earn your paid subscription, shoot me an email: cmclymer@gmail.com. And if this is too big of a commitment, I’m always thankful for a simple cup of coffee.]

---

If you happen to live in the continental United States and heard primal screaming this past Friday evening, I want to apologize. That may have been me.

I was reading an article from the Anchorage Daily News in which Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) expressed outrage over Donald Trump and her Republican colleagues once again betraying her on a legislative deal.

As you’ll recall, Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill”—which gutted Medicaid benefits and food assistance programs and will put hundreds of rural hospitals at risk of closing down—was barely passed by the Senate at the start of this month after three Republicans defected and J.D. Vance saved it with his VP tie-breaking vote.

Thom Tillis (NC), Rand Paul (KY), and Susan Collins (ME) refused to play along, but Sen. Murkowski—despite her many protestations during the process—folded like a cheap lawn chair after she negotiated rather paltry concessions for Alaska in exchange for all that was lost comparatively.

One of those concessions was preserving a 12-month window of tax credits for wind and solar programs, which is particularly important for Sen. Murkowski’s state given that the vast majority of its land area isn’t connected to a centralized power grid and energy costs are pretty high and these programs are expensive and would create a lot of jobs and are good for the environment since Alaska is experiencing some of the fastest warming in the world.

But alas, shortly after the bill was passed, Trump signed an executive order that could limit the awarding of tax credits for said projects and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a new directive requiring his personal approval for wind and solar projects on federal land and water, thus likely hobbling and even killing such efforts in the state.

In her interview with Alex DeMarban of Anchorage Daily News, Senator Murkowski was outraged:

I feel cheated. I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else… I read it as just a total affront to what we had negotiated… To me, it’s just reckless by the administration… So now you have an executive order that goes against what the president himself signed into law, in my view… If you were looking for something proof-positive that the administration is looking to literally cut off a sector of the energy industry, it couldn’t be more compelling than first the EO and now the (Interior directive).

I can’t help but find this fascinating in light of Sen. Murkowski’s consistent criticism of the bill before and after its passage and the performative agony she expressed during the process that would make Daniel Day-Lewis blush.

In the weeks prior to the final vote, she told Axios that Trump’s July 4th deadline was “arbitrary” and the proposed policies are “less than what we want” and questioned why her fellow Republicans were afraid of conference negotiations.

On the day of the vote, she told reporters that voting for the bill is “agonizing” and expressed her hope that “the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”

Not quite done, she went to Twitter and wrote a long defense of her vote—which she called one of the hardest she’s taken during her time in the Senate—and closed with this assessment and plea:

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.

And then, of course, the House completely ignored her and Trump and his Interior Secretary blatantly stabbed her in the back because that’s exactly what they do.

It was earlier this year when Sen. Murkowski offered some startling honesty at a conference of tribal and nonprofit leaders when she was asked what she would say to folks who are afraid in the current political climate:

We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. We’re in a time and place where — I don’t know, I certainly have not — I have not been here before. And I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real. And that’s not right. But that’s what you’ve asked me to do and so I’m going to use my voice to the best of my ability.

Folks, at this point, I don’t really know what else to say about Senator Murkowski. I believe her constituents and Americans generally are left with one of two conclusions:

Either she’s one of the most naïve people in the United States Senate (and perhaps in all of American politics) and her sense of political triangulation has atrophied so much as to render her mostly ineffective or she knows exactly what’s going on around her and lacks the courage and character to fight back.

Senator Murkowski could have saved many millions of Americans from losing their health care coverage and their food assistance and their local hospitals, but she pushed in all her chips on a deal that was reneged by Trump almost immediately after the vote was finalized.

She held the power to stop this future destruction and suffering—the decisive vote—and bargained it away for a prize that now appears to be all mirage and no miracle.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me repeatedly over many years, and I must be the senior senator from Alaska.

---

---