The Alaska Purchase

Last week, Senator Lisa Murkowski stepped up to be the poster child for what is wrong in this country. As you know, the Big Bad Bill, that the majority apparently opposes, still passed through Congress anyway. For starters, this bill will add trillions to our debt. And according to The Dispatch, what we currently pay in interest on our national debt is more than we pay for Medicare and the military. So, adding to the debt isn’t what I’d call “fiscal conservatism.”

Murkowski was one of four republican senators who had signaled they would vote no, but in the end, she caved.

Afterward, Murkowski told ABC News she “struggled mightily with the [bill’s] impact on the most vulnerable in this country.” Well, there you go. We can take comfort in the fact that she had a mighty struggle. That should make the people losing support programs and health insurance feel better about it. In the end, you still voted for it, senator. If you’re worried about the most vulnerable in this country, your vote could have protected the interests of all of them.

In the aftermath, she grappled for rationalizations. “Do I like this bill?” she said. “No. But I tried to take care of Alaska's interests.” (ABC News) I’ll have to agree with Sen. Rand Paul, who said she took “a bailout for Alaska at the expense of the rest of the country." (Buzzfeed 2 July 2025) Alaska’s good, but tough luck for the vulnerable in all the other states.

Curiously, she continued by saying, “We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination. My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.” (ABC News) You know what that sounds like? It sounds as if she clearly understood this bill was bad, but she didn’t have the courage to vote against it. Instead, she hoped someone in the House would do the right thing and stop it, which of course, didn’t happen.

And isn’t that the problem in a nutshell? It’s easy not to worry about others as long as I can protect my own. We might know the right thing to do, but we hope that someone else does it. And you know what? That’s exactly what authoritarians rely on.

We have a party in power that is terrified of Donald Trump. Almost no one will cross him. If you do, you’ll be attacked on Truth Social then primaried – like Thom Tillis. He understood the price of voting against the bill, so in the end, he decided it was just easier not to run again in the next election. And as we keep losing leaders who dare to vote their conscience, what will we have left? The broken Congress we see before us.

Wouldn’t the government of a Christian nation look more like this? “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” (Phil. 2:3-4)

It was hard to watch Murkowski back down, when she has had moments of being an independent voter in the past. After all, she did vote for Trump’s second impeachment, so she’s already on his bad list anyway. Still, her vote, which looked to her own interests, meant this country lost plenty.

We can criticize her cowardly vote, but we’ll also have to ask ourselves how we’re operating as individual citizens. Are we backing down because we’re scared, exhausted, or apathetic? This approach to our country – as long as I protect my own while hoping someone else will stand up – will never make this country great. But it has every chance of enabling our "government of the people, by the people, for the people" (Gettysburg Address) to perish from this earth.

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