Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski told CBS News senior correspondent Norah O’Donnell that she’s navigated President Trump’s Washington by staying focused on constituents in her home state of Alaska.
In a wide-ranging interview for “CBS Sunday Morning,” O’Donnell spoke with the GOP senator about navigating a polarized Washington as a moderate, why she doesn’t feel allegiance to the Republican Party, and her new memoir, “Far from Home: An Alaskan Senator Faces the Extreme Climate of Washington, D.C.”
Here are some highlights from the extended version of Murkowski’s interview, which can be watched in the player above:
The “big, beautiful bill” and why Congress “is not doing its job”
Murkowski, who has served in the Senate since 2002, is a key vote in determining whether Republicans’ so-called “big, beautiful bill” passes the upper chamber. The bill would implement Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda and cut trillions of dollars in taxes and spending, including hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legislation would add $2.4 trillion to federal deficits over the next 10 years, a figure Republicans dispute. The House passed its version of the legislation in May.
Murkowski told O’Donnell that “something” will pass the Senate, but she has “significant reservations” about how cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, or food stamps, will impact Alaskans. Alaska is the state most dependent on federal funding, with 32% of its population enrolled in Medicaid.
The senator said she has not given the Trump administration an “absolute” red line that would cause her to vote against the bill, and said she would communicate her concerns “every step of the way.”
“I want to try to do what we can to address certain aspects of our entitlement spending,” Murkowski told O’Donnell. “We’ve got to do that. But doing it with the most vulnerable bearing the brunt of that is not the answer.”
Back in February, following a flurry of executive orders from the White House, Murkowski warned her GOP Senate colleagues that the legislative branch must not cede its authority over controlling government spending to the president. She told O’Donnell that Congress should not cede ground to “anybody,” including the executive branch and the courts.
“We have a role that is prescribed under Article I of the Constitution,” Murkowski said. “We need to take that seriously. And I fear that what we’re seeing more and more is a Republican conference in both the House and the Senate that may agree with the goals of President Trump, and so they’re good with however we get there.”
Murkowski said she believes her GOP colleagues are not acting as a check on the executive branch’s use of emergency powers because they agree with the policy outcome. “We need to ask ourselves, if this was President Biden or if this were to be a President Booker, how would we respond?” Murkowski said (referring to Democratic Sen. Cory Booker). “Because I don’t think we would just sit back and say, ‘It’s OK that you use that.'”
Asked by O’Donnell if Congress is capitulating, Murkowski said, “I think it’s Congress not doing their job.”
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Murkowski says her allegiance is “not to the Republican Party”
Murkowski’s independence on Capitol Hill has raised questions about her party loyalty. She was one of three Republicans who voted against confirming Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, and also voted against Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the FBI.
Murkowski also said she has never voted for Mr. Trump, the leader of her party, in a presidential election.
“My vote, my views, and so for me, it was the decision that I made. I have a hard time voting, kind of for the lesser of two evils, if you will,” she told O’Donnell. “I want to be a proactive voter. I want to vote for somebody who I believe in.”
Murkowski knows what proactive voting looks like. In 2010, the senator won a historic write-in campaign after she lost the GOP primary to a conservative candidate aligned with the Tea Party movement. She said her path to return to the Senate reinforced her independence on Capitol Hill.
“I still have the same Republican values that I have long held,” Murkowski said. “But my allegiance is not to the Republican Party. It’s not to a party. It is to the people who returned me. And those people were Republicans and Democrats and independents and nonpartisans.”
After Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021, Murkowski was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict him on the charge of incitement to insurrection over his role in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Murkowski was the only Republican who was up for reelection the following year and voted to convict.
The president openly clashed with Murkowski during her 2022 reelection campaign, throwing his support behind Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate. Today, Murkowski said she needs to work with the administration and is aware her effectiveness in Congress is linked to her relationships with key members of the White House team.
“It is no secret that I did not support the president, and it’s also no secret that the president did not support me,” Murkowski told O’Donnell. “He actively campaigned against me in the state. But at the end of the day, he won, I won.”
On her vote for RFK Jr.
Murkowski voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of health and human services. He recently removed every member of a committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines, a controversial move that caused consternation among some GOP senators who supported him.
“I don’t like what he did on the vaccine committee,” Murkowski told O’Donnell.
Asked if she regrets voting for him, the senator said, “I don’t get any do-overs. I just don’t. And so I’m not going to spend a lot of time saying I regret the vote.”
Murkowski did praise Kennedy’s support of the Indian Health Service. She said that in a private call, the secretary vowed not to make cuts to the agency. Murkowski also said many of her constituents feel Kennedy is “on the right track when it comes to chronic diseases,” acknowledging that many of her constituents struggle with conditions like diabetes.
“Is he 100% for me? No,” Murkowski said. “Is he somebody that I can have that conversation with and have him come back … to me with answers? Yeah.”
Murkowski says Kavanaugh lacked “self-awareness” about impact of sexual misconduct allegation
Murkowski was the only Republican who voted against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, following testimony by Christine Blasey Ford, who alleged that Kavanaugh assaulted her decades before when she was 15 and he was 17. Kavanaugh strenuously denied the allegation and was eventually confirmed by the Senate.
In her memoir, Murkowski writes about a private meeting she had with Kavanaugh before the final vote to confirm him. She told O’Donnell that she felt Kavanaugh did not have “self-awareness” about how the allegation against him “opened a wound and a scar” for women across the country.
Murkowski said the purpose of her meeting with Kavanaugh was not to address his qualifications, but to stress the importance of “women being believed.”
“It was a matter of, are you aware that this has brought out such passion and such emotion from so many women around the country?” she said.
“But he didn’t, he didn’t get it. He couldn’t acknowledge it,” she added. “And what it showed me was that he was not able to understand what was happening in the country.”
In a chapter of her memoir titled “No More Silence,” Murkowski briefly mentions in a single paragraph that she was sexually assaulted as a child. “I chose one very quick paragraph to acknowledge that I had been in the same place that other women had,” she told O’Donnell.
“It’s scary to be vulnerable and to share certain things,” Murkowski said. “But I saw the strength of so many women during that time when the Kavanaugh hearings were going on. Women who were afraid to speak up, but felt that they needed to. And in speaking up, they empowered other women to do the same.”
The overturning of Roe v. Wade
Murkowski is Catholic, and also supports abortion rights. The senator voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, both of whom would go on to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 in a landmark case that repealed the nationwide right to an abortion.
“I never imagined the extreme possibility that it could be overturned completely,” Murkowski writes in her memoir.
Murkowski told O’Donnell she came to that conclusion based on “representations” the justices made about Roe in their private discussions and public comments.
Asked if she was misled by Gorsuch and Barrett during their confirmation processes, Murkowski told O’Donnell, “I actually asked that question of myself in the book, right? Was I misled? Or did they say what they needed to say, which was, ‘This is settled precedent, this is well-defined.'”
Barrett and Gorsuch said during their confirmation hearings that Roe is a precedent of the Supreme Court, but declined to classify it as falling into the category of a “super-precedent.” In 2020, Barrett told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she defines super-precedents as “cases that are so well-settled that no political actors and no people seriously push for overruling.”
Murkowski said she does not bear responsibility for the outcome the justices reached in Dobbs v. Jackson, the 2022 case that overturned Roe.
“I do not accept responsibility for the fact that they made decisions and determinations to the best of their ability,” Murkowski told O’Donnell.
Murkowski says Alaskans’ fear about federal cuts “is real”
Murkowski clarified comments she made to a crowd of nonprofit workers in Anchorage back in April, when she said “we are all afraid.” Murkowski said she was speaking about federal grants that had been frozen or paused, and echoed the concerns of her constituents.
“I have shared with them that fear … That fear is real, and so I can’t tell them, ‘Don’t worry, don’t be afraid.’ I have to say, ‘I feel that, too,'” Murkowski said. “I can’t say, quite frankly, things are fine right now, because I don’t feel that they are.”
The senator also addressed her previous comments that she sometimes feels anxious about using her voice because “retaliation is real.” While Murkowski said she doesn’t feel individually threatened to cast her votes a certain way, she told O’Donnell, “We are seeing actions out of the administration where we’re saying, this is just beyond the norm.”
Remaining rooted in Alaska
Even after serving more than two decades in Washington, Murkowski told O’Donnell she still feels like a “bit of a stranger” in the nation’s capital. Murkowski travels to her home state nearly every weekend — a journey that takes 12 hours each way.
Murkowski says the trip is worth every minute because the people in Alaska anchor her.
“That’s how I think I have mastered Trump’s Washington, is staying focused on my Alaska,” she said.
READ AN EXCERPT: “Far From Home” by Lisa Murkowski
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