When the Republican-controlled Senate passed the disastrous megabill on Tuesday, the deciding vote came from Sen. Lisa Murkowski. The Alaskan lawmaker, who has long claimed to be a moderate, got over the finish line the bill for President Donald Trump’s priorities, which would send billions of dollars to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, extend tax cuts for the wealthy, kick large abortion providers out of the Medicaid program, and knock millions of low-income people off their health insurance.
Murkowski cast this vote just a week after she suggested in a podcast interview that she’d consider becoming an independent and caucusing with Senate Democrats. She cast this vote, which could shutter nearly 200 Planned Parenthood clinics, after repeatedly painting herself as “pro choice.” She cast this vote after Planned Parenthood called the bill a “backdoor abortion ban” and said it could eliminate one in four abortion providers nationwide.
Oh, but pity the poor senator: “I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country when you look to Medicaid and SNAP,” Murkowski told reporters. In another interview, with NBC News’ Ryan Nobles, she said, “Do I like this bill? No.”
Murkowski herself could have forced changes to the bill by refusing to vote for it.
She added, however, that she voted to pass it because otherwise Trump’s 2017 tax cuts would expire, which would hurt people in Alaska. “I had to look on balance, because the people in my state are the ones that I put first. We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” Murkowski said. “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”
But these were empty words, even before the House signaled it would not change the bill: Murkowski herself could have forced changes to the bill by refusing to vote for it. She already had negotiated concessions for Alaskans, like a tax deduction for whaling boat captains, and exceptions to work requirements for SNAP. But then she gave up her leverage and approved a bill that subjects people in other states to the harms she worried about.
As Bolts Magazine Editor-in-Chief Daniel Nichanian noted after the vote: “The Senate’s small-state ultra-bias is never more maddening than when one senator uses it to get benefits for her 740,000 constituents while openly acknowledging the bill she’s supporting will harm the nation’s 339 million other residents.”
These backroom deals and abandoned principles are, in a nutshell, why people dislike and distrust politicians. And few issues have demonstrated Murkowski’s flexible ideals like abortion.
After the leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion, which overturned Roe v. Wade, she criticized the pending ruling in a statement. “I strongly support women’s reproductive freedoms,” she said, “including the right to abortion established by Roe and Casey. I also believe in limited government and an individual’s liberty to make choices about their own health.”
Fewer clinics means less access to reproductive health care.
But Murkowski’s claim to be pro-choice has always been a farce. She voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, despite their anti-abortion views. She opposed Brett Kavanaugh because of sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh (which he denied). But she went out of her way to predict that he would not “be a vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
All three of those justices voted to overturn Roe. Shortly after the Dobbs ruling leaked, Murkowski also refused to support a Democratic bill to codify Roe’s protections in federal law by claiming it went too far, and instead urged lawmakers to support a doomed, narrower bill she introduced with Maine Sen. Susan Collins. Now, the budget reconciliation bill Murkowski voted for this week would harm reproductive freedom by shuttering scores of clinics that provide abortion and other health care. The bill doesn’t mention Planned Parenthood by name, but rather says that organizations are not eligible to participate in Medicaid for one year if they provide abortions outside the Hyde Amendment exceptions (rape, incest or to preserve the life of the pregnant person) and received at least $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements in Fiscal Year 2023. Conservatives refer to this as “defunding” but, in actuality, abortion clinics don’t get direct Medicaid funding. They accept the insurance for services like cancer screenings, birth control prescriptions and sexually transmitted infections testing, and then Medicaid reimburses clinics for providing the care. Kicking out Planned Parenthood clinics would be a blow to the organization, as over half its patients have public insurance like Medicaid — this is why they project that hundreds of clinics would close. Fewer clinics means less access to reproductive health care, so this bill could affect anyone who gets health care from Planned Parenthood — even if they have private insurance — and it could further reduce options for abortion-seekers traveling to other states. While the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America may give Murkowski an “F” rating, this vote is the latest example of how she’s always a model Republican when it counts. Her decision may have been “agonizing,” she insists. But whatever agony she felt will pale in comparison to the misery this bill will cause Americans who lose their health insurance, get snatched off the street, or no longer have access to reproductive care that Murkowski claims to champion.
Susan Rinkunas
Susan Rinkunas is an independent journalist and co-founder of Autonomy News. Her work has appeared in Jezebel, The New Republic, The Guardian, Slate, The Nation and more. 
