If Lisa Murkowski stays with the GOP, she will have functional control of the Senate floor while wielding increasingly powerful gavels.
The president has taken to social media to blast Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski. Calling her “the Republicans’ Worst Senator, by far,” he went on to criticize her at length for her opposition to DOJ’s lawsuit in Alaska seeking to counteract potential shenanigans stemming from ranked-choice voting and the fake “Dan Sullivan” running against Alaska’s junior senator, the real Dan Sullivan. The situation in Alaska is, indeed, outrageous — and I have argued, alongside former Federal Elections Commission Chairman Sean Cooksey, that it is possibly criminal — but it’s not clear that alienating the Alaska political figure who likely controls the votes Sullivan needs is the most prudent course for the president.
Perhaps more important still is the wisdom of alienating Senator Murkowski with the live (if perhaps optimistic) possibility of a 50/50 Senate on the horizon. Twitter commentators have tut-tutted that this sort of behavior from Trump might just cause Murkowski to cast her lot with Chuck Schumer and deprive Republicans of a majority if Trump keeps this up.
I’m skeptical. Senator Murkowski, while perennially frustrating, knows her business, and the fact is that there’s a lot for her to lose personally in switching parties. Furthermore, if her goal is to be a thorn in Trump’s side, her ability to do so would be greatly enhanced as the most powerful single senator in recent memory, charting an independent course, compared to being yet another foot soldier in Chuck Schumer’s #Resistance army.
The last time a senator switched sides and took the majority with him was when Vermont’s Jim Jeffords defected to the Democrats in May 2001. His reasons ranged from his alienation from an increasingly conservative GOP conference to petty squabbles over special-education funding. But in order to seal the deal, then–Democratic Whip Harry Reid offered to give Jeffords his post atop the Environmental and Public Works (EPW) Committee to compensate him for giving up his Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) gavel. In exchange, Jeffords agreed to vote with Reid on all procedural matters unless Reid told him he could do otherwise.
For Murkowski, the question is whether such a deal is possible and how it compares to the alternative. The answers are probably not, and not well.
What does Murkowski’s position look like in a 50/50 Senate as a Republican? If it’s 50/50 because Senator Susan Collins lost, then Senator Murkowski would be in line to chair the powerful Appropriations Committee. She would also be third in line to be President Pro Tempore behind Chuck Grassley and Mike Crapo. There is simply no way for Democrats to meet those prices.
What if, assuming a just and loving God who takes care of His own, Collins wins in two weeks? Then the Appropriations Gavel is out of the question, at least for the next couple of Congresses. (Even there, though, Republican Conference rules would make it possible or even likely that Murkowski would take the top spot in her next Senate term if she stays Republican.) With Mitch McConnell’s pending retirement, though, the chairmanship of the important (especially for Alaska) Defense Subcommittee (SAC-D) will open up and likely go to Murkowski. There is also the possibility that Rand Paul will keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, in which case Murkowski would ascend to the gavel for HELP. At minimum, this is a leverage point she has with John Thune and the Republicans to buy her loyalty.
On the flip side, what can Democrats offer her? Brian Schatz is in Reid’s position this time around, and all he can give her is Indian Affairs. That simply doesn’t compare to Appropriations, SAC-D, or HELP. Perhaps he could knife Martin Heinrich and offer her Energy and Natural Resources? Been there, done that. The fact is that, politically, Appropriations (Patty Murray), EPW (probably Bernie Sanders), and HELP (probably Tammy Baldwin) are out of the question. So no new committees for Murkowski are in play in a Democratic offer.
Perhaps they could get Chris Coons to take one for the team and give Murkowski SAC-D? Even there, it’s a problem. Appropriations subcommittees get fixed pools of money to spend — known as 302(b) allocations. The bigger the allocation to SAC-D, the smaller to other subcommittees, and vice versa. A Republican chair always fights to maximize the SAC-D allocation at the expense of non-defense discretionary spending; a Democratic chair always seeks to boost their priorities in, for example, Transportation and Housing (T-HUD) or Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor-H), which in turn comes out of the hide of SAC-D. This will especially be the case with the new and loud Third World socialist voices joining the House and Senate Democratic caucuses. So the best-case scenario for Murkowski would be the same subcommittee gavel, but (1) without the possibility of advancement to run the whole committee and (2) with much less money to spend. Some deal.
That’s just the committee side of it. What about the Senate generally? In a 50–50 Senate, Murkowski will functionally call the shots. Nothing will move without her say-so. This will make her — if she wants it — the most consequential single foil to the president’s agenda he has seen as he approaches eight years of governing. If she defected, though, as with Jeffords before her, she would simply be another vote in Schumer’s majority.
The Republican Conference has, for a century and a half, privileged the independent will of its members. No one’s vote is owned by his or her Republican colleagues today any more than it was in the 1870s. That’s why it’s a “conference.” In contrast, the Democratic caucus expects strong party discipline and has caucus rules in place to enforce it. This is why even socialist gadflies like Bernie Sanders play ball with guys like Reid and Schumer, and relative institutionalists walk the plank on, say, nuking the filibuster. Schumer’s team; Schumer’s rules. That would almost certainly be in the fine print for Murkowski as much as it was for Jeffords.
We don’t need to speculate on all of this. In the 50–50 118th Congress, the de facto majority leader and whip was Kyrsten Sinema for most legislative business. However much McConnell liked and admired her, this would not have been the case had she given him his 51st vote and put him in the majority. She’d have gone from floor leader to foot soldier — and so she never made the switch. That’s the dynamic at play with Murkowski: She can, like Sinema, run the floor and force Thune to tolerate it, or she can put Schumer in charge and play according to his rules. Not irrelevant in this calculus is the fact that Thune is an honorable guy who would treat her fairly, whereas Schumer would deploy his well-practiced bullying mendacity to get what he wanted regardless of Murkowski’s preferences.
Lastly, Murkowski is up for reelection in 2028. While Twitter conservatives are quick to assume she’s a dead-man walking, nobody knows Alaska politics better than she does. (When she successfully ran as a write-in independent in 2010, her campaign wrote a song in Inuit to teach the Alaska natives how to spell her name.) You have to assume that, all other things being equal, it’s better to run as an independent-minded Republican in Alaska than as a Schumer Democrat. Furthermore, promises of incumbent support from Thune are far more credible than they’d be from Schumer — just look to Arlen Specter on that score.
In short, if Lisa Murkowski stays with the GOP, she will have functional control of the Senate floor while wielding increasingly powerful gavels for the remainder of her time in office. She will have personal power the likes of which probably has not been seen since the days of Robert Byrd. If she defects, she might get a consolation prize of a committee she’s already run while having to take orders from Chuck Schumer.
Her personal interest here is obvious. But let’s say she is converted to a true believer when it comes to “fighting the Orange Menace,” what’s better for her there? As a Republican, the administration and her Republican colleagues will have to take her concerns seriously in fights she chooses to pick. As a Democrat, she’ll be just another member of the #Resistance, fighting the battles chosen by Schumer in consultation with the likes of Liz Warren and Abdul El-Sayed. You can perhaps understand why the president himself might prefer the latter. Senator Murkowski should prefer the former.