On Tuesday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski tried to shame her Republican colleagues for taking orders from President Donald Trump instead of acting like an equal branch of government as our Founders intended.
“We’re lawmakers. We should be legislating,” she told them. “What we’re getting now is a direction from the White House and being told, ‘This is the priority.’”
She ought to know by now that most of them, including Sen. Dan Sullivan, will almost always bow to Trump’s demands.
Their latest act of feeble acquiescence is about a bill to rescind funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). “Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement,” he wrote last week in a social media post.
Murkowski knows that public broadcasting is an essential service for Alaska’s rural communities. Without it, “warning systems for natural disasters, power outages, boil water advisories, and other alerts would be severely hampered.”
To Trump, that’s irrelevant. He claims PBS and NPR don’t provide their audiences with “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events.”
If he could, he’d shut down CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of what he’s long referred to the “enemy of the people.” They’re “almost all dishonest and corrupt,” he argued while campaigning last fall. “The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!”
It’s true those networks lean left politically; MSNBC being farther left than the others. But if he was really interested accurate and unbiased reporting, he’d also be calling out Fox News. For knowingly misleading their audience about the 2020 election, they coughed up three quarters of a billion dollars.
“Trump insisting on the election being stolen and convincing 25% of Americans was a huge disservice to the country,” Rudolph Murdoch wrote in January 2021. He was still chairman of Fox Corporation when he sent that private email to the network’s CEO. It was unearthed during the discovery process of the defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox.
So let’s dispense with Trump’s concern about bias. What matters to him isn’t whether the news media is honest. It’s how they portray him. He expects the networks to misrepresent any truth and censor any opinion that makes him look bad.
That makes honest reporters, publishers, and broadcasters a target in his retribution agenda.
None of this is new. It’s been his part of his playbook since his first term.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public,” Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, said in December 2017 when he announced he wouldn’t seek reelection. Without naming Trump, he warned his colleagues not to ever accept as normal his “the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons.”
And as Murkowski is doing today, he reminded them that survival of our democracy is dependent on Congress upholding the constitutional separation of powers in which “the equal branches of our government would balance and counteract each other when necessary.”
That was 7-1/2 years ago. With few exceptions, congressional Republicans looked the other way.
Indeed, they ceded power to Trump even when he wasn’t in the White House.
Their most sheepish moment was in February 2024 when, at his urging, they rejected a bipartisan foreign aid and immigration reform bill. Murkowski was one of four senate Republicans to support it.
But their worst act was in February 2021 when 43 of them, including Sullivan, voted to acquit him for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“Pretty much a crime,” Murdoch wrote in his private email.
Ten months later, NPR referred to it as an “an insurrection or a coup attempt” which “was fueled by what’s known as the ‘Big Lie.’” Unlike Fox though, they published it. That and many other truths Trump can’t handle is what the recission bill is really about.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
