Sen. Lisa Murkowski criticized President Trump Wednesday night for dismissing thousands of federal employees and she said Congress needs to call him out when he violates his constitutional limits.
“If the president, for instance, should, should seek to withhold federal funding that has already been authorized and appropriated, that … violates the Budget Act,” Murkowski said. "It violates the Impoundment Act, and it cannot be allowed to stand."
Murkowski is one of the most-watched Republicans in Congress because she’s often willing to cross Trump. She’s a moderate from a Trump-supporting state, but she was at her most outspoken Wednesday night. If Congress is going to hold Trump to the Constitution, she said, more of her colleagues have to join her.
“It requires speaking out and standing up, and that requires, again, more than just one or two Republicans,” she said. “It requires us, as a Congress, to do so.”
Murkowski spoke during a telephone town hall with more than 1,000 constituents, and many others said they tried to dial in but couldn’t get through.
She said no question would be too hard to answer and no one would be cut off, which seemed to be a rebuke of the town hall Congressman Nick Begich held Monday, which featured only gentle questions.
One of Murkowski’s callers asked her about Trump’s stance on Ukraine. (Trump on Wednesday called the Ukrainian president a dictator and said, falsely, that Ukraine was the aggressor with Russia.)
Murkowski said Trump’s insults were uncalled for.
“It is wrong to suggest that somehow or other Ukraine started this war, asked for this war,” she said. “It is clear for all the world to see and to know that Putin invaded Ukraine and started the war.”
The senator suggested this may be part of Trump’s unorthodox negotiating style but she said it’s head-spinning to hear Trump sound more supportive of Russia’s president than Ukraine’s.
Much of the town hall concerned the mass firing of federal employees. Murkowski said workers were mistreated and some of the dismissals violated laws that protect civil servants.
“If we feel that we have a bloat in our system, or redundancy in our system or inefficiency, we can address that,” she said. “But you do it with respect and dignity towards people, and we are just not seeing that.”
Editor's note: An audio recording of Sen. Lisa Murkowski's town hall has been added to this story. It begins a minute or two after the town hall started, with a break of a few seconds at 38 minutes.
