In the struggle to pass President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, it was his biggest Republican critic in the Senate who came to the rescue: Lisa Murkowski.
Throughout the GOP’s painful scramble to come up with 50 Republican votes for the reconciliation bill, Senate leaders targeted Murkowski — one of four key holdouts.
The moderate Republican — famous for bucking her party during Trump’s 2017 health care bill negotiations, during Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court confirmation and during the 2021 Senate vote on Trump’s impeachment — had vocally shared her concerns about Medicaid cuts and reductions to food assistance programs in the reconciliation bill. But GOP leaders apparently saw Murkowski as the most gettable senator. So they tried to appeal to the senior senator’s central political philosophy: Alaskans above all else.
After Murkowski won carve-outs and provisions to blunt the effects of the bill’s cuts on her state, as well as a tax break for Alaskan whaling captains, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program exemptions and a $50 billion rural hospital fund, she backed the bill.
But Murkowski was hardly taking a victory lap on Tuesday.
“This is probably the most difficult and agonizing legislative 24-hour period that I have encountered,” she said. “And I’ve been here quite a while, and you all know I’ve got a few battle scars underneath me.”
Murkowski’s tone after the vote was one of exhaustion, of weariness. She confessed to reporters that, “We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” and that there were plenty of measures in the nearly 1,000-page package that “my team was not enthusiastic about at all.”
“I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country,” Murkowski told reporters after the vote.
“When you look to the Medicaid and the SNAP provisions, I committed myself and my team from the very get-go of this process that we were going to try, every day, to contribute to a better outcome for the people in my state,” she continued.
Apparently, the provisions benefitting Alaska and shielding her state from some of the worst consequences of the bill were sufficient to win her vote — she just wasn’t happy about it, knowing people in the other 49 states weren’t as lucky.
An established Trump critic who has slammed the Department of Government Efficiency and the administration reverting the name of Alaska’s Denali mountain to McKinley, Murkowski’s ultimate approval of the president’s marquee legislation was perhaps the most important gift she could have delivered him.
Where less moderate Sen. Thom Tillis chose to upend his political career by voting against the bill — with Tillis hours after that motion to proceed vote announcing his retirement — Murkowski chose to engage in the last-minute backroom dealings she purportedly despises. And she did it in the name of advancing legislation for the man she supposedly loathes.
To hear Murkowski tell it, however, her decision was strictly pragmatism. As she endeavored to numb the pain the bill might cause Alaskan Medicaid and SNAP recipients, the potential upsides of the bill became more tolerable.
“We have two options here, right?” she explained to reporters. “Kill it, and it’s gone, and there is a tax impact coming forward that’s going to hurt the people in my state.”
“Kill it, and the provisions that are going to be very helpful for economic development in my state would no longer be available,” she continued.
“Kill it, the provisions that we got to soften the impact on Medicaid recipients, on our hospitals, particularly our small community hospitals, that would all be gone,” she added.
But not everything went Murkowski’s way. In the final hours of negotiations, NOTUS confirmed that Senate Republicans proposed a handwritten adjustment to a proposal that developed a preference for an Alaska Medicaid fund, hoping it would satisfy reconciliation procedural requirements known as the Byrd Rule.
Democrats challenged the move, and the parliamentarian struck it down.
“Senate Republicans were trying to get Senator Murkowski’s vote,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters. “The Medicaid provision in question was a handwritten parenthetical notation not even disclosed to the Dems that created a special new preference for Alaska. We fought and we won. This is a polar payoff, and it should not have stood, and it didn’t.”
Of course, Alaskan politicians have their own spin on the carve-outs getting stripped out of the legislation, several of which would have also applied to Hawaii. Sen. Dan Sullivan told reporters, “The inside story on this is the Hawaiians got screwed by Schumer more than anybody.”
But even without that last-minute fix, Murkowski said other elements of the bill still outweighed her perceived ultimate costs to the state. She cited the value in renewing Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, advancing resource development projects, ending tax on tips and overtime, as well as boosting funding for the Federal Aviation Administration and the Coast Guard, which have significant presences in Alaska.
It was that case — that the good tucked into the reconciliation bill outweighed the bad — that her Senate Republican colleagues told NOTUS they hammered into Murkowski.
“I just sat in and talked with her,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said. “I said, ‘No. 1, I’m frustrated too that we had popular border security provisions — money for the military, making tax cuts permanent — got overshadowed by the complexity of the bill. But are you good? And if you’re not good, tell me why. See if we can fix it. But we got to move forward.’”
Not everyone is thrilled about the special treatment Alaska received. Sen. Rand Paul, another holdout who voted “no,” told reporters he spoke to Trump Tuesday morning about his position, explaining that if the Senate stripped its $5 trillion debt ceiling increase, his vote would be in play.
“In the end,” Paul said, “they chose to add more subsidies for Alaska to get Senator Murkowski.”
There’s plenty of reason leadership would target Murkowski’s vote over other holdouts. Paul is a hardliner, and his demand to strip out the debt ceiling was a lonely crusade. Tillis, once he announced his retirement and went scorched-earth against the bill, had no incentive to change his mind. And Sen. Susan Collins — the last holdout — is facing a tough reelection bid this year. Collins voting against the bill and touting her independence in Maine now could ultimately benefit a Republican majority down the line.
But also, during more than two decades in the Senate, Murkowski has cultivated a reputation as an independent-minded straight shooter. Republican senators told NOTUS in May that they consider her a good-faith negotiating partner, even if they regularly disagree.
“It’s politics,” Sen. Bill Cassidy told reporters of Murkowski’s outsized role shaping changes to the bill. “Would you expect anything different?”
Democrats, apparently, did expect different, holding out for a fantasy where Murkowski would tank the bill, much like Sen. John McCain’s infamous thumbs down in 2017. Murkowski immediately began incurring wrath across the aisle, with Rep. Jim McGovern telling Politico her vote was a “dereliction of duty.”
Republicans, on the other hand, are thrilled they could count on Murkowski ultimately being a team player. After all, Murkowski has repeatedly dangled the possibility of becoming an independent in recent weeks.
“I have just a tremendous amount of respect for Lisa, and all of us need to represent our state and ourselves,” Sen. John Curtis told NOTUS. “And I just, you know, to watch Lisa go through that is not easy, so I have a lot of respect for how she handled it.”
Majority Leader John Thune showered Murkowski with similar praise and presented the vote as a feather in his own political cap.
“She obviously came to her conclusion,” Thune told reporters. “She, as you know, is a very independent thinker and somebody who studies the issues and I’m just grateful that at the end of the day, she concluded what the rest of us did — or at least most of the rest of us did — and that is that this was the right direction for the future of our country.”
Murkowski left the Capitol Tuesday less sure that the bill would direct the country the right way. In fact, she said she is rooting for the House to delay the legislation and amend it.
“My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” she told reporters.
“And I would hope that we would be able to actually do what we used to do around here,” she continued, “which is work back and forth between the two bodies to get a measure that’s going to be better for the people in this country, and more particularly for the people of Alaska.”
Her outlook sounded even more grim in a statement released hours after the vote.
“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,” she said.
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS.
Oriana González and Ursula Perano, who are reporters at NOTUS, contributed to this report. John T. Seward, Em Luetkemeyer and Margaret Manto, who are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows, contributed to this report.