SALON

Tuesday, Mar 6, 2012 6:05 PM UTC

Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Blunt vote: My bad!

Alaska moderate says position she took a couple days ago was big mistake

By

Topics: Republican Party, U.S. Senate, Lisa Murkowski, Birth Control, Contraception,

Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Blunt vote: My bad!Lisa Murkowski (Credit: AP)

Whoops! Sen. Lisa Murkowski regrets a vote she took … a few days ago. If she knew five days ago what she knows now, she never would’ve supported the Blunt Amendment, the add-on to a highway bill that would’ve allowed any employer with “moral objections” to refuse to cover contraception — or any other health-related service or activity — in their healthcare plans. Murkowski voted for the amendment, along with every other Republican save retiring Maine moderate Olympia Snowe. Now, one weekend later, she says sorry. She had no idea she was signing on to a hugely unpopular and politically suicidal campaign to restrict the rights of women!

Alaska’s Murkowski is not quite a Snowe-level RINO, but she did rather famously lose a primary election to a Tea Party upstart in 2010, putting her solidly in the “too moderate for the modern Republican Party” camp. (She then won reelection with a rare successful write-in campaign, in part because the Tea Party upstart turned out to be a weird extremist with a history of paranoia and lying.) She is pro-choice. She is obviously pro-contraception. She just voted against those two principles because … well, because she’s a Republican, and it seems like a bunch of Republicans briefly convinced themselves that this issue was a winner, politically.

Then she went home to Alaska for the Iditarod, and according to the Anchorage Daily News, a bunch of her supporters gave her what-for.

“I have never had a vote I’ve taken where I have felt that I let down more people that believed in me,” she said.

She’d meant to make a statement about religious freedom, she said, but voters read it as a vote against contraception coverage for women. The measure was so broad, it’s hard not to read it that way. I suspect Murkowski saw that, but for reasons she didn’t share with me, voted for it anyway.

Yeah, that isn’t a great excuse. Two weeks ago Murkowski was aligning herself with the conservative Catholic bishops and practically adopting the “Obama’s war on religion” talking point. Professional moderates like her are always shifting according to the prevailing political winds, but they usually don’t reverse themselves so definitively quite so quickly. And it is an especially bad look to do so less than week after a controversial vote.

It should be clear that there’s not actually room in the current party for pro-choice women — it’s clear to Snowe, it’s fair to say — and attempts by these 14 sad members of Congress to balance their needs to actually represent their constituencies with their responsibilities to party leadership will only get more difficult. The GOP basically just took a 40-year step back on reproductive rights, and everyone in the party who disagrees with that decision should have probably actively resisted it instead of apologizing after the fact.

Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 27 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations