Republican Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski has long been an outspoken critic of President-elect Donald Trump.
She says she never voted for him. Not in 2016, not in 2020, and not this year.
After Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Murkowski said Trump should have resigned the presidency immediately. She was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack. Trump then vowed to campaign against Murkowski; still, she won reelection in 2022.
Now, Murkowski says she will work with the Trump administration, setting aside their fraught history.
“At the end of the day, regardless of how a given president feels about me personally or politically, my job, my role is to make sure that Alaska stands to gain, and that’s what I intend to do,” Murkowski said Wednesday.
“I have been able to work with every single president, Republican and Democrat, to advance things that work in Alaska’s best interest. That’s part of my job,” said Murkowski, who met with Alaska news media in her Anchorage office. “You figure out areas that you can work together in. You figure out those areas where you need to push back in.”
Murkowski, like other Alaska politicians, has said that Trump’s policies could be more favorable to resource development projects in Alaska.
One area where she said she expected to push back on a Trump agenda was on the fate of the Affordable Care Act, the law championed by President Barack Obama that Trump tried unsuccessfully to repeal during his first term in office.
“By then, there had been a growing acceptance and appreciation for how the ACA had allowed so many people who weren’t able to previously receive insurance be able to afford to have it,” said Murkowski.
She said “there may be areas” where she would be willing to consider changes to the law, but she was not open to a wholesale repeal of it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said ahead of Election Day that his caucus would seek to reform the Affordable Care Act if Trump is re-elected. Even congressional inaction during a Trump presidency could impact the Affordable Care Act. Republicans have signaled they may allow major subsidies approved during the Biden presidency to sunset. Those subsidies helped ACA enrollment nearly double in recent years.
Murkowski originally voted against the Affordable Care Act in 2009, then voted against its repeal in 2017.
Murkowski, who voted against the Biden Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, also said she would not support its wholesale repeal. Trump has vowed to repeal parts of the bill.
“There are many aspects of the IRA that are legitimately issues that may be worthy of review. But it’s not unlike what we saw with the ACA, where once the law was in place, you started to see the benefits play out from it,” said Murkowski. She said those include tax provisions that have led companies to invest in microchip manufacturing and green energy technologies.
“People are saying, ‘Well, not sure that I liked what got us here, but I like what’s happening now, so don’t get rid of this,’” said Murkowski.
“Oftentimes it just doesn’t make sense to unspool it all,” said Murkowski.