Sen. Lisa Murkowski says President Trump is testing the limits of his power.
In a speech to the Legislature Tuesday, Alaska’s senior senator, a Republican, said the president has gone too far during his first two months back in office.
Trump has frozen funding that Congress approved. He’s moved to shutter agencies created by law. He’s fired thousands of federal workers across dozens of government offices, from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Energy to the U.S. Forest Service and the National Weather Service.
Murkowski said she’s “disturbed” by the cuts to the federal workforce.
“These terminations are indiscriminate, and many we're now learning are unlawful. And they're being made regardless of performance, and with little understanding of the function and the value of each position,” she said. “At any human level, they're traumatizing people, and they're leaving holes in our communities.”
Federal courts have reversed many of Trump’s moves, though it’s not always clear how faithfully the administration abides by those court orders.
Just this weekend, Trump administration officials refused to stop a flight deporting alleged members of a Venezuelan gang without an opportunity to present their case to a court. Trump officials argue the judge’s order came too late, though flight records reviewed by news organizations indicate that’s not true.
Murkowski told state lawmakers that legislators have a duty to assert their and the courts’ authority under the Constitution. And she said there are plenty of reasons to deport gang members — but she said the government still has to give the accused due process guaranteed to everyone in the United States, citizen or not, by the Constitution.
“We’ve got to stand up, and we have to make sure that it is understood that we are all separate but equal branches of government. When the court's orders are defied, that weakens our courts,” she said. “When the people no longer believe that the system of justice is there for them, what do we have in this country?”
Some commentators have described the administration’s apparent defiance of a federal court order as a constitutional crisis.
Murkowski said that’s not how she sees it. In her speech, she said the Trump administration was “testing the court to see how far they might be able to go.”
“No, we’re not in a constitutional crisis,” she said in an interview after the speech.
Murkowski said there’s “a lot of debate” over the timing of the order and whether the administration intentionally ignored it. But she said she’s “worried” the country could approach a crisis “if we don’t work to maintain and enforce the rule of law that we, as Americans, have come to expect and to rely on.”
“But then the real question is, so, what do we do about it? What do we in Congress do about it?” she said. “I would suggest to you that if we fail to do anything, if we say it's all OK, because I happen to like what the President was moving towards … but yet we allow our preference for that policy to override our own respect for the institutions of democracy, that's when you may get closer to a constitutional crisis.”
Murkowski said she’s worried her Republican colleagues in Congress, who lead both the House and Senate, might not stand up even if Trump openly and clearly ignores a court order.
Rep. Dan Saddler, R-Eagle River, asked Murkowski during a question-and-answer session after her speech if there was any prospect that Congress might modify laws giving the president broad authority to use emergency powers.
Trump has used such powers to justify tariffs on imports and invoked an 18th century wartime law never before used in peacetime to speed deportations.
Murkowski said she’s not holding her breath.
“Is it possible for the legislative branch to act on this? Yes. Do I see that happening with the current construct? No,” she said.
She said at a news conference after the speech that she’s been criticized harshly for standing up to the president, who has vowed retribution against his enemies — and that’s why others in her party are staying silent.
