Murkowski can still do the right thing—forfeit the sale of her vote on GOP/Trump tax scam
The biggest two of the six Alaska kickbacks granted to Sen. Lisa Murkowski to buy her vote on the GOP/Trump big tax scam cannot be approved with a simple majority vote, the Senate parliamentarian ruled.
The GOP/Trump tax scam would cut Medicaid sharply in other states, but Alaska would have seen an increase, an attempt to buy the vote of Murkowski, an opponent of Medicaid cuts.
Sen. Dan Sullivan is whining that the kickbacks inserted into the bill were backed by Trump and all Senate Republicans, and only the Democrats are to blame for their removal.
The bill would cut Medicaid spending nationwide by nearly $1 trillion, but the kickbacks would have meant hundreds of millions more Medicaid funding for Alaska, according to Sullivan.
“The national party openly cutting hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicaid funding for Alaska is the Democrats,” said Sullivan.
The Democrats “just celebrated stripping my provision for increasing Medicaid dollars for Alaska from the bill. What hypocrites,” Sullivan complained Sunday.
To make this clear, candidate Sullivan, who knows all about Senate hypocrites, is lying about why these provisions are no longer in the bill.
The Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan office that interprets Senate rules, removed them from the bill because they violate Senate policies.
The office ruling was that the provisions would need 60 votes to pass. The Republicans are trying to pass the bill with a simple majority and can’t get 60 votes for anything.
Sullivan needs to stop lying about this.
In any case, now that the special favors for Murkowski have been removed, she should take this opportunity to oppose the bill as it would lead to major Medicaid cuts, something she has claimed she opposes.
“It was uncertain whether she would still back the legislation if those sweeteners were dropped,” the New York Times reported.
Murkowski should forfeit the sale of her vote to the Republican leaders who offered special exemptions for Alaska that they denied to people elsewhere in America. With this underhanded tactic and Murkowski’s acceptance, the big scam advanced to debate on a 51-49 vote.
“The parliamentarian ruled that the boost to the federal share of Medicaid for certain ‘high-poverty’ states, which happened to be Alaska and Hawaii, did not comport with the Byrd rule, which requires everything to have a primarily budgetary purpose. That would have increased Alaska’s federal share by 25 percent. In addition, a boost to health care reimbursement payments for Alaska and Hawaii for hospital outpatient services was also tossed. Hawaii, the other noncontiguous state, was added to these so Senate Republicans could make the case that they were not singling out Alaska; that gambit did not work,” wrote David Dayen, executive editor of the Prospect.
The remaining kickbacks to Alaska are: exempting Alaska from a rule requiring the state to pick up more of the costs of food stamps; an exemption for work requirements for food aid; a $50,000 tax exemption for whaling captains; and a tax exemption for some Bering Sea and Aleutian fishing operations.
What Murkowski did not get in the bill is the so-called 90/10 split on future revenues from oil leasing on lands in the NPR-A and ANWR on the North Slope, starting in 2034.
The Senate reduced the split to 70/30, starting in 2034. It was Rep. Nick Begich the Third who pushed to get the 90/10 split in the House version of the bill and hailed it as a “historic” win. The victory didn’t last long.
Previous bills have called for a 50/50 split. Any change enacted now for revenues starting in 2034 would be subject to revision by a future Congress.
Even Gov. Mike Dunleavy was unaware of the 90/10 loss Saturday, when he wrote on X that the 90/10 split for the two areas, approved in the House version of the bill, were two of the five reasons for backing the bill.
Murkowski, who believes in an orderly and thoughtful process, surely recognizes that this exercise is a disgrace. The exemptions added to help Alaska are a corrupt bargain and now two of the big ones are off the table.
The big scam contains an unprecedented cut to safety net programs for tens of millions of Americans.
More work is needed to produce something other than a jumbled mess. There is an artificial deadline created as a publicity stunt by Trump.
There is still time for her to do the right thing. The same applies to Sullivan, of course, but he is incapable of separating himself from the rule of Trump.
It is unfair in some ways to single out Murkowski because 50 other Republicans, including Sullivan, also voted to advance the scam for debate, but they were bought and paid for long ago.
The potential for some independent thought centers on Murkowski and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. The rest of the GOP senators are holograms in expensive suits.
The big GOP scam would add $3.5 trillion to the national debt and cut Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion. It would give billionaires a giant tax cut, while the 30 percent of Americans at the bottom of the scale would have their incomes reduced.
The Congressional Budget Office said Saturday that the Republican plan would mean 11.8 million more Americans would lose health insurance coverage by 2034.
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