Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is criticizing Sen. Lisa Murkowski for the Alaska Republican’s decisive vote to advance the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” last week.
“I was very disappointed, putting it mildly,” Klobuchar told MSNBC host Jen Psaki.
Klobuchar also attacked a provision in the bill that will delay federal cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for states with high payment error rates, which includes Alaska.
“They wanted to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse? They’re actually encouraging it,” she said. “If I’m a governor in a state, I’m like, ‘get my error rate up,’ because it could save me a billion dollars a year on a state budget.”
Murkowski extracted several concessions — many of them specific to her state — from GOP leadership over an agonizing and overnight Senate session last week.
It took several attempts to design a change to SNAP funding that would blunt the impact to Alaska, at least temporarily. An earlier provision that carved out exemptions for Alaska and Hawaii as noncontiguous states came under fire from Democrats, including Klobuchar, and was ultimately axed by the Senate parliamentarian.
GOP leaders instead settled on the use of error rates in order to comply with the Senate’s rules around budget reconciliation.
Still, after voting to advance the bill, Murkowski signaled that she was not wholly satisfied, calling on the House to improve it.
However, in the face of potential defections from their side over the size of the national debt and insistence from the White House that it should pass, House Republicans elected to ram the bill through unamended.
Klobuchar and Murkowski have worked together on occasion, introducing legislation to combat fetal alcohol disorders and regulate content generated by artificial intelligence in political ads.
The Alaska senator is known for her independent streak and has broken with her party on key votes such as the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which she opposed.
Klobuchar said people will lose Medicaid coverage as a result of the legislation.
“I think the people that are going to be really upset are the people who are going to be thrown off their health care,” Klobuchar said, citing an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that 17 million Americans could lose their health insurance over 10 years.
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