Lisa Murkowski was hammered on social media after voting Tuesday to advance Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation bill through the Senate and paving the way for its final passage.
After her vote Tuesday, the Alaska senator told reporters in Congress that she hoped the House would make changes to the bill before sending it back to the Senate.
“Reconciliation is never a very dignified process, but we were operating under a timeline that was, basically an artificial timeline,” said the senator. “And I think rather than taking the the deliberative approach to good legislating, we rushed to get a product out.
“My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we're not there yet,” she said.
“Do I like this bill? No. But I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests.”
That quote went on to be pilloried by numerous Democrat-aligned figures on Twitter and other media platforms.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is showing no interest in going back to the drawing board, however, even in the face of threats to vote against the legislation from nearly two dozen House Republicans.
“We knew we would come to this moment. We knew the Senate would amend the House product. I encouraged them to amend it as lightly as possible. They went a little further than many of us would have preferred, but we have the product now,” Johnson said on Tuesday.
“As the president said, it’s his bill. It’s not a House bill, it’s not a Senate bill, it’s the American people’s bill.”
But even with Johnson’s latest rollover to the party’s leader, Murkowski was due to become Washington’s target for scorn after the Senate’s vote. Her support for the measure came after an intense lobbying campaign that involved Alaska-specific sweeteners added to the package, including a delay on penalties for the work requirements she and her Republican colleagues supported in the bill.
Democrats and even some Republicans, like Republican no-vote Sen. Rand Paul, accused her of attempting to soften the effects of the legislation’s deep spending cuts in her state, while hanging the rest of the country out to dry.
The Kentucky libertarian, commenting to reporters after the bill’s passage, said that Murkowski wanted a “bail-out” for Alaska at the expense of the rest of the country, a remark that earned NBC’s Ryan Nobles a 10-second stare-down from Murkowski when Nobles repeated the quote to her.
Murkowski then told Nobles she would make “no excuses” for fighting for her state. She maintained in multiple gaggles with reporters over Tuesday that Alaska’s intensely rural population led to a set of unique circumstances that needed to be addressed around work requirements and food stamp eligibility.
That explanation didn’t satisfy the other side of the aisle.
“She’s a cheap date,” quipped Rep. Jim McGovern during a session of the House Rules Committee on Tuesday, commenting about a tax break for whaling that he inferred was included to win over Murkowski.
The national Democratic Party meanwhile set to work on a particularly aggressive effort to highlight Murkowski’s criticism of the bill, which she raised again and again in comments to reporters after the vote.
Lisa Murkowski: https://t.co/8ajpXKpunk pic.twitter.com/VRQCBoH3a5
— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) July 1, 2025
Murkowski, however, is not up for re-election until 2028 — and doesn’t represent the most appealing of a target for the party anyway, given her centrist bent and Alaska’s political landscape. As a result, Democrats are focusing on another central figure in the GOP effort to get the “big, beautiful bill” to Donald Trump’s desk — his top deputy and link to Congress, Vice President JD Vance.
Though he only served in the Senate for a fraction of one term before joining Trump’s presidential ticket (in both cases with Donald Trump Jr.’s backing), Vance maintains strong ties within the GOP Senate caucus and was hard at work leaning on them over the weekend, according to Republican senators.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin, an ally of Vance who spoke to reporters after the vote Tuesday, referred to the vice president as the White House’s “closer” on the budget deal.
A number of prominent Democrats used social media posts to highlight Vance’s role as the tiebreaker in Tuesday’s vote, including two men thought to be eyeing possible runs for president in 2028: Pete Buttigieg and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
Buttigieg said in March that he thought seriously about running for Senate in 2026, but decided against it. Both are thought to harbor strong ambitions for future political office.
“What happened to you @JDVance — author of Hillbilly Elegy — now shrugging off Medicaid cuts that will close rural hospitals and kick millions off healthcare as ‘minutiae?’” wrote Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman representing Silicon Valley who is one of Vance’s top critics in his public statements.
The strategy is far from random. Vance, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are considered to be two of the top contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 now that Donald Trump himself has waved away the idea of challenging the Constitutional ban on presidents serving for more than two terms.
Still relatively new to politics, Vance nevertheless has strong political backing and a key ally in the president’s oldest son, Trump Jr. The former senator also proved to be a formidable debate opponent during his 2024 televised matchup with Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, and demonstrated an ability to leapfrog past more experienced candidates when he vaulted into the lead in his race for Senate in 2022.
All that is to say, Democrats clearly are looking to weaken Vance (and likely Rubio, too) as the party looks to take on a more aggressive, punchy approach to fighting the GOP after the debacle of 2024.
An Emerson College poll in June found that Vance is the strong favorite among Republican voters to be the 2028 nominee.
