Senator Lisa Murkowski has long been a pain in the ass for Democrats. Murkowski will support a Democratic cause now again, but she is best known for feigning concern over this or that Republican bill, only to step in line when it comes time to vote. Murkowski, along with feckless compatriot Susan Collins, continue to “fuck over the American people.”
Recently, local attorney Donald Mitchell set the record straight on Murkowski in an opinion piece for the Anchorage Daily News.
Here’s what he had to say:
Over the past forty years, the Alaska Republican Party has morphed from the party of Jay Hammond and Ted Stevens into the party of Donald Trump and Mike Dunleavy. Watching that happen, Alaskans who are not members of a political party and who collectively are more than half the electorate, and many Democrats, have taken solace in the fact that in 2002 in one of the most brazen acts of nepotism in American political history Frank Murkowski appointed his daughter to his seat in the United States Senate.
Had there been a special election to fill the seat, Lisa Murkowski would have been the last person Alaska Republicans would have elected. But everyone who knows her, including me, will vouch that Lisa is a decent, courteous, kind, and thoughtful woman who has seemingly grown into the job.
But since 2002, Lisa has won four elections only because having no discernible, consistent political ideology enabled her to be all things to all Alaskans, particularly independent and Democratic voters who in three of those four elections saved her from her own party.
In 2004 Lisa won the Republican primary election because Ted Stevens cleared the way for her, she raised $3.5 million mostly from Outside political action committees, and the Alaska Republican Party allowed independent voters to vote in its primary election, most of whom, according to pollster Ivan Moore, preferred Lisa to Mike Miller, a right-of-conservative former legislator who was her principal opponent.
In 2010, Ted Stevens was gone and the Alaska Republican Party no longer allowed independents to vote in its primary election. As a consequence, Lisa lost fair and square to Joe Miller, for whom Sarah Palin, who has no use for father and daughter Murkowski, campaigned and for whom Sarah arranged for the Tea Party Express political action committee to spend $600,000 to get out the vote for Miller. But after reneging on her promise to abide by the results of the primary election, Lisa won the general election because independents and Democrats wrote in her name on the general election ballot.
After being reelected in 2016 by only a plurality in an election in which the Alaska Republican and Democratic Parties did not run serious candidates against her, in 2022 the jig finally should have been up. But two years earlier, Scott Kendall, who in 2016 had been Lisa’s senior campaign aide, orchestrated the passage of an initiative that brought the ranked choice voting system to Alaska.
In “Far From Home,” her hagiographic as-told-to autobiography, Lisa says she told Kendall she thought ranked choice voting was a bad idea, but she then “didn’t have any further involvement,” and “my team insulated me from the issue to avoid the appearance that the initiative was intended mainly for my benefit.” That spin stretches credulity past breaking. But even if true, Lisa was the beneficiary because in 2024, ranked choice voting allowed her to avoid having to compete against Donald Trump and Mike Dunleavy’s handpicked candidate, Kelly Tshibaka, in a Republican primary election she would have lost. Instead, she was elected to a fourth term by the independent and Democratic voters who had been her base since the beginning of the political career her father arranged for her.
But in the predawn hours of July 2 in one deplorable act of political pusillanimity, Lisa shattered her relationship with the independent and Democratic voters who had three times saved her. After the usual performative handwringing and dithering that Alaskans have come to expect, she provided the last vote Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune needed to pass H.R. 1, Donald Trump’s Big Ugly Bill.
The bill contains tax cuts mostly for corporations and the wealthiest Americans that, over ten years, will add $3.3 trillion to the $36 trillion federal debt. And the red ink would be worse if the bill did not eviscerate the safety net that keeps millions of Americans healthy and food secure. Here is what Maine Independent Sen. Angus King told Lisa and her colleagues before she cast her vote:
“Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table saying, ‘I’ve got a great idea. Let’s give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’ I’ve been in this business of public policy for twenty years, eight years as governor, twelve years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”
After she cast the deciding vote, Lisa had the chutzpah to try and garner sympathy by telling the press how “agonizing” her decision to provide that vote had been. She also told NBC News reporter Ryan Noble that she knew when she cast it that “there are Americans who are not going to be advantaged by this bill.” Twelve million adults and disabled children who lose their health insurance, and the millions more who will become food insecure will be merely “not advantaged”? Lisa Murkowski, do you actually believe that?
On this site, Scott Kendall, ever the loyal sycophant, recently argued that Lisa made the best of a bad hand by selling her vote in exchange for the benefits she extorted for Alaska because if she had not done so Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul would have given Senate Majority Leader Thune the last vote he needed to pass H.R. 1 and Alaska would have gotten nothing.
There is a difference between spin and purposeful disingenuity that Kendall’s defense of the indefensible illustrates. Because he knows as well as I do that Sen. Paul would not have provided the last vote except in exchange for massive reductions in federal spending to which Donald Trump would never have agreed.
In 2017, Arizona Sen. John McCain solidified his reputation as a patriot who put what was best for the American people above partisan politics by turning his thumb down and refusing to provide the last vote Donald Trump needed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Lisa had an opportunity to join Senator McCain as a solon whose service to the nation will be remembered and admired by future generations. Instead, when political courage counted, she turned out to be just another go-along-to-get-along fiscally irresponsible Republican hack. Speaking only for myself, that failure of moral rectitude will be remembered.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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