Retired Army Officer Wants to Take Saw to Partisan Gridlock in D.C.

Next to incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s name on November’s General Election ballot will be the names of several people looking to unseat her and take over her job in the United States Senate.

“I think Lisa Murkowski is a really nice person, but she’s been a terrible senator for Alaska.”

That’s the opinion of Margaret Stock, an Anchorage immigration attorney, and U.S. Army Lt. Colonel (ret.) who is running as an Independent candidate against Alaska’s senior senator.

“Like many other Alaskans I’ve been disappointed in her. I’m an independent, like 54 percent of Alaskans are independent. It’s the majority choice of Alaskan voters to be independent,” she said.

“Most of (Murkowski’s) funding is from corporate PACs. And in my campaign I’ve renounced corporate PACs. I don’t take money from corporate PACs. I only take money from individuals, and I’ve taken a very small amount of money from ideological PACs – bipartisan, ideological PACs,” Stock said.

If elected, Stock said she’d tackle the problems in Obamacare.

“I’m for fixing the law. I don’t want to repeal it, because repealing it would take away health care from thousands of Alaskans. Many more people are insured now because of the act. But the costs of the act are out of control, and that’s one thing the D.C. partisans are not dealing with at all. It doesn’t seem to bother them that costs get out of control because that benefits the corporations who are making profits from people’s healthcare being really expensive,” she said. “So what I’d like to do is go to D.C. and fix the Affordable Care Act, turn it away from being the “Unaffordable” Care Act and back into an affordable option for Americans.”

Stock, who first came to Alaska on active duty with the Army, has degrees from the Harvard School of Law, the Kennedy School of Government and the U.S. Army War College. She has taught constitutional and national security law at West Point. Stock is also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, or “Genius Grant,” for work she did after 9/11 at the Pentagon.

“So I was the architect of a program that would allow legally present immigrants who had passed stringent background checks, to join the military for the purpose of lending help to the intelligent community with their language abilities. We also recruited healthcare professionals,” Stock said. “And in exchange for that – eight years in the military – they got American citizenship, which allowed them to work for the United States Government.”

One of the people Stock says she recruited was former Kenyan Paul Chelimo, who, since he became a U.S. citizen and joining the Army, won a silver medal in the 5,000 meters for America at the Rio Olympics this summer.

Stock will be in Kodiak next month for the debates being planned by the chamber of commerce.