Days after Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski cast a decisive vote for Trump’s megabill —calling the vote “agonizing,” the process “awful,” and pointing to the House to fix a bill that only advanced because of her — the House did not, in fact, fix the bill.
After much arm-twisting and backdoor dealmaking — with plenty of assurances being made, sort of like how Murkowski boasted about “securing commitments” from the notoriously noncommittal Trump administration that may temporarily spare Alaskans of the gut punch that all but the most wealthy of Americans will feel under the bill’s slate of deeply regressive policies — House Republicans passed the bill without any changes.
Turns out that you can’t bank on the right thing happening when you’re not willing to do the right thing yourself.
Now, not only does Murkowski show her vote can be secured for so little (many of the carve-outs that she and her few remaining defenders will point to are temporary, like the SNAP exemption that lasts only two years, and conditional), it also shows she’s clinging onto politics of a long bygone era ill-suited to our current political moment.
The House Republicans were never going to open the bill up for changes, a point that leadership admitted today, when browbeating, arm-twisting and hollow assurances work even better in the world of Trump. The one opportunity that Murkowski had to dramatically alter the course of a bill, when she knew “there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill,” was with her vote.
Today’s House vote is a grim coda to a watershed moment for the ostensibly moderate, allegedly process-focused lawmaker. I imagine that many Alaskans are asking themselves, What was the point of voting for Murkowski over Kelly Tshibaka, if not for this moment?
As pollster Ivan Moore said in a viral post on Bluesky: “For years, Lisa Murkowski has survived by sitting on the fence, alternately tossing red meat onto one side, then the other. Well, today, the fence broke.”
Her defenders might call it a prisoner’s dilemma; that Murkowski is just as pragmatic as ever because she looked at a bad bill for the country and took the (temporary) offramp for Alaska, rather than letting Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins or Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul dictate the terms that got the bill to passage. But the point of the prisoner’s dilemma wasn’t to see who could sell out their colleagues the fastest, but that by standing together and sticking to your convictions, you can limit the pain that everyone feels.
But perhaps that, too, is a relic of a bygone era.
Perhaps it’s time for Alaska’s Congressional delegation to come up with a new motto to replace Ted Stevens’ words: “To hell with politics. Just do what’s right for Alaska.”
How about, “To hell with our fellow Americans, just do what is less bad for Alaska.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
