Lisa Murkowski nearly handed Democrats key Iran war powers vote in Senate

The Senate is two votes away from taking action this week to handcuff President Donald Trump’s war officials in Iran.

This was the closest Senate Democrats came to trying to reassert Congress’s authority on the issue, and they nearly succeeded, thanks to a Senate Republican known for an independent winning streak: Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

This vote specifically comes after Congress quickly passed the 60-day deadline to authorize or stop Trump’s war. Murkowski said she hoped the administration would provide more clarity on next steps, but so far she has not received such information.

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“So I felt it was time to move forward with demobilization so that we could discuss our responsibilities through the War Powers Act,” Murkowski said. “So we’re in a different place on this issue than when we last voted.”

Most of his votes for or against any bill are determined by a simple principle: How will this vote affect Alaska?

“Senator Murkowski approaches every decision thoughtfully and always asks what is best for Alaska,” Murkowski spokesman Joseph Plesha told Fox News Digital. “When he believes a policy advances those priorities, he supports it regardless of party or policy.”

That kind of decision-making was on full display last year with Murkowski’s most significant legislative achievement of her second term, when she cast the deciding vote on the president’s “big, beautiful bill.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, speaks at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on July 11, 2023 (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for JDRF)

But at the time, Murkowski described the decision as “agonizing” and only reached it after a string of wins for Alaska.

“I had to strike a balance because the people in my state are the ones I put first,” Murkowski said. “We don’t have a perfect bill by any stretch of our imagination. My hope is that the House will take notice and understand that we’re not there yet.”

Murkowski had hoped that the Senate and House of Representatives would go to conference to come up with a better product, but that never happened. After the upper house introduced the package, the House passed it a few hours later to meet Trump’s July 4 deadline.

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Just a few weeks later, he took on Trump and Republicans with a package designed to strip billions of dollars of funding back to public broadcasting and “wake up” international aid programs.

Murkowski, one of the seizers, said that instead of enacting legislation, “right now we’re getting an order from the White House and we’re being told, ‘This is the priority we want you to implement on this issue. We’ll be with you for another round.'”

“I don’t accept that,” he said at the time.

He also opposed Trump’s actions in Venezuela earlier this year and joined Democrats on a successful procedural vote; that vote later failed after intense lobbying by the White House and senior Trump officials overturning key votes against the war powers resolution.

Similar to her reasoning regarding Iran’s war powers vote, Murkowski argued that there was no “meaningful end state” given by Trump officials, even though the administration claimed that the Venezuelan government complied with it following the capture of Nicolás Maduro.

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Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, speaks to reporters outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, on October 3, 2025. (Graeme Sloan/Getty Images)

And under the Saving America Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, Murkowski once again defied the president.

He stepped up his resistance to voter ID and citizenship verification legislation early on, weeks before Republicans launched a campaign to debate the doomed bill on the Senate floor.

Murkowski noted that when congressional Democrats “try to advance comprehensive election reform legislation in 2021, Republicans are unanimously in opposition because it would federalize elections, something we have long opposed.”

“Not only does the U.S. Constitution explicitly give states the authority to regulate the ‘times, places, and manner’ of federal elections, but one-dimensional powers from Washington, D.C., rarely work in places like Alaska,” he said.

Perhaps Murkowski’s biggest break with Trump occurred as she left office shortly after the riots on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.

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Murkowski was one of a handful of Republicans who voted to convict Trump.

“If months of lies, organizing a rally of supporters to obstruct the work of Congress, encouraging the mob to march on the Capitol, and then taking no meaningful action to stop the violence once it began isn’t worthy of impeachment, conviction, and removal from office in the United States, I can’t imagine what is,” Murkowski said in a statement at the time. he said.