Murkowski claims she doesn't like the GOP bill for which she provided the deciding vote

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who had claimed she opposed cutting Medicaid, provided the deciding Senate vote on the Republican plan to slash Medicaid by $1 trillion, add $3.3 trillion to $5.3 trillion to the national debt and extend costly tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country.

She said she doesn’t like the bill and knows it will damage people throughout the country, but she thinks that parts of it will help Alaska.

“While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we know it,” she said.

But special favors inserted in the bill to buy her vote will make easy targets in time to come.

Cutting health insurance for millions of Americans, exploding the national debt and giving big tax cuts to billionaires are part of a sour mixture that will hasten the insolvency of Social Security and put the nation in financial peril.

The Republicans used an accounting scam to pretend that extending the 2017 tax cuts will cost nothing. It will cost $3.8 trillion.

“Do I like this bill? No,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski told NBC News. “But I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests. But I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.”

“I don’t like that. I don’t like the fact that we moved through an artificial deadline, an artificial timeline to produce something to meet a deadline, rather than to actually try to produce the best bill for the country,” Murkowski said after Senate passage.

Murkowski was miffed when NBC reporter Ryan Nobles mentioned that Sen. Rand Paul complained about a bailout for Alaska at the expense of the rest of the country.

“Oh my God,” she said, staring at the reporter for a long while until after he said, “I didn’t say it maam, I’m just asking for your response.”

“My response is I have an obligation to the people of the state of Alaska. And I live up that every single day. I fight for my state’s interests. And I make sure that Alaskans are understood. I work hard to take care of the state that has more unique situations, more unique people and it’s just different.”

“And so when people suggest that federal dollars go to one of our 50 states in a quote ‘bailout,’ I find that offensive,” Murkowski said.

“I advocated for my state’s interest. I will continue to do that and I will make no excuses for doing that. Do I like this bill? No. Because I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests. But I know, I know that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.

“But when I saw the direction that this was going, you know you can either, you can either say I don’t like it and not try to help my state. Or you can roll up your sleeves,” she said.

Paul, focused on the debt explosion, complained: “In the end they added more subsidies to the bill for Alaska to get Murkowski’s vote.”

One of the provisions in the Senate bill to help Alaska rewards the incompetence of the Dunleavy administration in mishandling the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, delaying the period when Alaska and nine other states with the largest error rates have to start paying new fees required in other states by the GOP. It’s an incentive for states to make mistakes on food assistance.

Meanwhile, Sen. Dan Sullivan held a press conference in which he said that Alaska fared better than any other state in the bill because of various exemptions and the Trump plan to open as much federal land as possible to oil and gas, mining and other development. There is also lots of money for the military.

He downplayed the impact of the $1 trillion Medicaid cut, downplayed the impact on federal debt and downplayed the impact of extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country.

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