This phrase isn’t mine. It’s the view of the Republican U.S. senator from the state to our north, Alaska, on what it was like doing business this summer with the presidential administration of her own party.
But I don’t doubt that before this is over, enough people in America will be muttering it that it could become the national motto.
“I feel cheated,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told the Anchorage Daily News. “I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”
I’ll get to what she feels swindled about in a minute, as it affects us here in Washington state, too.
But first: If only there had been some clue, some sign, that a politician who cheated with his charity, cheated on taxes, cheated on his wife, cheats at golf, cheated his contractors, cheated his customers and then attempted the biggest cheat of all — on the American election system — might eventually work his way around to cheating you, too?
Points to Murkowski for confessional honesty. But this makes her one of the all-time winners of the “oops, I fell for it again” award. Right up there with anyone who thought Donald Trump was really going to be the one to release the Epstein Files.
So how does Murkowski feel she got conned? It’s a revealing story — one that stands as a morality play of modern politics.
It started back in 2022, when then-President Joe Biden and the Democrats created a major tax credit for wind and solar farms. That program was paid for with higher taxes on corporations and stock buybacks. Because paying for stuff is generally unpopular, Murkowski voted “no.”
She instantly pivoted, however, into a huge backer of using the tax credits in her state. On Capitol Hill, they call this maneuver “vote no and take the dough.” You get credit for the benefits and no blame for the pain.
It was awkward then that this summer’s GOP budget bill, known as Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” was written to zero out the tax credit program. Murkowski protested that this would torpedo some desperately needed wind power projects in southeast Alaska.
In exchange for her yes vote, she cut a deal that said if a project were to begin construction within a year, it could still get the tax breaks.
But other Republicans wanted the clean energy subsidies canceled immediately, and the Trump administration also made a deal with them. He’d do an executive order after the bill’s passage to restrict the use of the tax breaks, and to give the Interior Secretary the power to review and kill the projects.
The news release announcing all this dubbed wind and solar as “the Green New Scam” — so you can see just how committed they were to honoring Murkowski’s side of the bargain.
“I read it as just a total affront to what we had negotiated,” she said. “It just pulls the rug out from underneath the deal.”
“Do I feel like the administration was not being upfront with us? Yes,” Murkowski said.
I’m supposed to be good at reading politics. But the unlimited supply of dupes for Trump’s various cons continues to amaze. There’s no way I would have guessed back in, say, 2016, that it would take until 2025 for a U.S. senator to divine that Donald Trump is maybe not being upfront with us.
The bottom line is Murkowski got played. As a result, many wind or solar projects that are in the planning stages are now in doubt. Washington state has a number of these, mostly slotted for Central or Eastern Washington.
“There are some projects — particularly in the West — that are going to be directly impacted by this, significantly impacted by this,” the head of a financing company for solar and battery storage projects told Politico.
One clean energy expert told me it’s too early to tell which specific Washington solar projects could be in trouble. But an analysis by think tank Energy Innovation found Washington ranks among the Top 10 states expected to be hit hardest by the moves.
The American Clean Power Association was blunt about Trump’s approach: “It’s an intentional effort to slow clean energy production.”
Trump has repeatedly said he thinks windmills cause cancer and that the entire green energy drive is a left-wing scam. So again, what did we expect was going to happen here, folks?
Anyway, “vote no and take the dough” has a long, craven history in Congress. But now they’ve graduated to “vote yes and express regrets.” Or, “vote aye and start to cry.”
I had to laugh — or was it weep? — at this other self-flagellating headline last week: “Hawley aims to roll back Medicaid cuts he voted for just two weeks ago.”
That would be Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who joins Murkowski in this GOP “regrets” caucus.
“To console and redeem themselves, Republican lawmakers are creating a whole new Kama Sutra of contortions, whereby they justify (or even nullify) yes votes with postscripts and asterisks,” wrote Frank Bruni of The New York Times.
But Murkowski’s story is the saddest. In Alaska tradition, she’s an independent, one who is now trying to navigate a party that more resembles a personality cult. She’s playing by old rules and norms that are no match for the casual deceit of the moment.
She feels cheated? Join the growing club.
Danny Westneat is an opinion columnist for the Seattle Times.
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