Murkowski, Begich put partisanship on back burner

In back-to-back press conferences in Anchorage, Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski proclaimed their allegiances to the moderate wings of their respective parties and vowed to put governance ahead of partisanship.

Murkowski, a Republican who has begun rising into the minority leadership ranks in the Senate, flatly rejected the idea voiced by some in her party that the failure of the Obama presidency would help them regain the White House and Congress.

"I need President Obama to succeed. This country needs him to succeed, because if he fails, the economic recession that we are in now gets worse," Murkowski said. "If I were to go to work every morning with the thought in mind that what we need to do is tear down the other guys to build us up, I wouldn't want this job."

And Begich, a Democrat, said he stood up to his leaders in a bipartisan effort that wrung out more than $100 billion from the stimulus package to make it more palatable to Republicans. That effort won no Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate -- Murkowski was not one of them -- but Begich said it made for a better bill with effective oversight.

"You're dealing with a pretty sizable bill -- you're going to have a lot of theatrics going on," Begich said. Three other major bills have already passed the new Congress with much less bickering, he said, leading him to hope that the stimulus bill was the exception.

TOURING THE STATE

With Congress in the week-long Presidents' Day recess, Begich and Murkowski were traveling around Alaska this week, talking about the economy and other issues and giving their own takes on the deluge of news from Washington over the stimulus plan. Unlike the senators, Rep. Don Young didn't send out a list of public appearances to the media. No schedule was posted on his official Web site and his staff couldn't be reached for comment Friday.

Begich just returned from Bethel, where he announced emergency assistance to residents of the hard-hit village of Emmonak through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The relief payments of $400 to $1,000 a person, meant to compensate for the high cost of fuel, may eventually be made available to other villages in Alaska, Begich said.

In his news conference Friday, Begich said the stimulus package could bring as much as $1 billion to Alaska through a multitude of programs: renewable energy projects, road construction and other public works, education funds, broadband Internet development and dozens of others. Tax relief will help more than 200,000 Alaskans, he said.

Begich said he has read and annotated the 1,100-page bill from cover to cover, footnote to footnote, but there were so many different pools of money with their own sets of rules and applications that it was impossible to tell so soon after passage the precise benefit to Alaska. But one thing was clear: If the state didn't officially apply for funds, it could leave about $500 million on the table for other states, he said.

Gov. Sarah Palin, a Republican, has questioned the stimulus package, saying she didn't want the state to be tied to maintaining new programs once the federal spending ended.

But Begich said a large part of the funds would go to construction projects or to programs that the state was already paying. He released a letter he wrote to Palin Wednesday, saying he was perplexed by her "failure to communicate" specific concerns.

Bill McAllister, Palin's spokesman, acknowledged that Palin had earlier criticized the bill in "broad strokes," but said that department heads in her administration were working on detailed analyses of the measure. Based on those reports, Palin would reach a decision within the 45-day deadline of the bill.

"It may be that nothing gets rejected," McAllister said. "The governor wants to be sure we don't just automatically take the money without thinking of the consequences."

Begich said he was also perplexed by Republicans in Congress who successfully amended the bill, then voted against it, claiming credit for both the amendment and for their negative vote. That group includes Young, who amended the measure to preserve a contracting benefit for Alaska Native corporations.

Begich declined to single out Young. But he said that Republicans worked in a bipartisan manner in committees, where there was very little news coverage, then attacked the bill on the floor when their speeches were televised. It was an eye-opener, said Begich, in his second month in Washington.

"What they want is both -- being able to say 'no' and 'yes,' " Begich said. "If I offer amendments to a bill, then I should be supporting that bill."

NOT ENOUGH TIME

Murkowski said her problem with the bill began in the Appropriations Committee, where it was moved less than 12 hours after she got a copy.

"I am the most junior member on that committee. I thought I had missed a meeting. I said, 'Wait a minute, we haven't talked about the bill, we haven't had any amendments on the bill, we just got the bill, surely something of this magnitude, we're actually going to have a committee hearing on it.' "

Afterwards, she said, she approached several ranking Republican members and told them, " 'That was the most amazing thing I've ever seen, but I'm sure glad that you have had an opportunity to have some oversight and some input into this,' whereupon I was told that they received a copy of the bill the same time I did, that there had been no, no, none, involvement by any Republican into any aspect of the bill."

That contrasted sharply with the Senate Finance Committee, she said, which held nine hours of hearings on the tax portion of the package.

But Murkowski declined to criticize the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii. "The chair of Appropriations is my friend and Alaska's friend," Murkowski said.

"We didn't start off the right way with this bill, and that's what you saw in the vote."

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Find Richard Mauer online at adn.com/contact/rmauer or call 257-4345.