Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski cast a pivotal vote in the Senate's passage of the president's sweeping tax cuts and spending reductions bill on Tuesday

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who voted against the bill, said Republicans could have won his vote by changing a provision related to the government’s legal borrowing limit, but they chose “pork and subsidies for Alaska” instead. Asked about Paul’s comment by NBC News, Murkowski froze and gave a reporter a death stare.

Attention then shifted to Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, the closest things the Senate still has to moderate Republicans, and the two senators who with John McCain deep-sixed Trump’s first budget bill back in 2017,