WASHINGTON -- Alaska's congressional delegation finished the legislative session on Friday split on whether a somewhat secretive and top-down approach to reaching a $1.8 trillion spending deal was worth what the state and the nation get in return.
Both the House and Senate passed the massive "omnibus" spending bill, as well as tax reform legislation, on Friday, sending them to President Barack Obama, who was expected to sign them into law.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Don Young voted in favor of the legislation. Sen. Dan Sullivan voted no.
All three lawmakers said the appropriations process that played out this week was not ideal. Murkowski and Young decided that keeping the government running, and many of the provisions included within, were worth approval.
Sullivan, however, decided that 72 hours was simply not enough time to adequately review the 2,200 pages of legislation.
"There's some good provisions that I certainly have advocated for and supported for Alaska," Sullivan said. But "no matter what people are saying, you can't do good due diligence on a piece of legislation that's that massive, in that amount of time, and I just couldn't in good conscience vote for that bill."
It was a tough call, Sullivan said -- he was undecided until the last minute, rising early Friday to head out on a long run to clear his head on the issue. He said he just didn't trust that everything in the bill was vetted properly.
"What if there are things in this bill that are not good for Alaska, or you think are not good for the country?" he asked.
The bill was negotiated mostly by staff, and doesn't do enough to bring down the nation's debt, he said. Or at least he doesn't think so.
"The first time I was really learning about the major tax reform in this bill was three days ago," Sullivan said. Some of the provisions seem pro-economic growth but "we had no hearings; we had no briefings."
Sullivan was one of 33 senators to vote against the bill.
Murkowski, on the other hand, declared her intentions to vote for passage the day before -- already listing wins included in the bill, many ferried through the process by her key position on the appropriations committee.
Once the omnibus package was released -- at about 2 a.m. Tuesday -- Murkowski and her staff dove in to sort through what was in and what was out.
"I knew what was in our Interior bill that we had negotiated" and she knew which items "were deemed big enough to go upstairs." So "I knew where we were on the funding issues," Murkowski said. It was the policy riders up for debate among high-ranking staff and lawmakers.
In the end, she said, Democrats took a "scorched-earth approach" to the controversial policy riders, and few were included in the final bill.
"And so my first inclination was, 'This is just really going to be hard to support,'" Murkowski said. But then what was included seemed worth it, she said.
"When you start going through all aspects of it and realizing the gains we've made on some of the Alaska-specific provisions, as well as the national provisions that help us … there's good substance, from a policy perspective," Murkowski said. She pointed to tax delays, increasing funding for the National Institutes of Health to study Alzheimer's disease and the lifting of the oil export ban.
And, "Has anybody noticed that the government is not going to be shut down? That's kind of a big deal," Murkowski said.
Young, for his part, fell somewhere in the middle of his counterparts on the Senate side. He voted in favor of the spending and tax reform bills -- offered separately in the House, instead of as one package like in the Senate. But he was bothered by the process.
The week played out much "like watching a barnyard of chickens when you're having an earthquake," he said after the close of House votes Friday.
"And it's lousy way, by the way, to legislate," he added.
Negotiating legislation behind closed doors instead of seeing the appropriations process all the way through and passing 12 separate bills, rather than one large "omnibus" bill, results in some bad and some good, Young said. But he would prefer the normal order of things.
The result is a bill that is too long and poorly written, Young said.
But, he said, "We tried shutting the government down ... It cost us $27 billion to shut it down and we didn't get anything out of it."
"This is not a bad bill," Young said.
Young was pleased with the funding allocated for the military in Alaska.
"We did pretty good on the fisheries -- but not as well as I wanted to," he said, pointing to policy riders that require labeling for genetically engineered salmon and keep Russian fish from being sold as "Alaskan pollock."
And he was happy with provisions included for Alaska Native communities -- revising how money is spent for health services, for instance.