Claire McCaskill Quotes

I'm a moderate. I hang out in the middle. I vote against my party with some regularity and try to compromise. It doesn't appear right now that the Republican Party is welcoming moderates any more.

I've got a really hard election. If you had a really hard election and it was after Labor Day would you go to North Carolina to a bunch of parties and glad-handing or would you stay home and work as hard as you know how to convince Missourians they should rehire you?

[Hillary Clinton] and I are fine. Are we going to be besties for the rest of our lives? No.

When the Tea Party comes to town, compromise goes out the door.

I have fought the establishment, run primaries, my entire career. I think that for Planned Parenthood or NARAL or the Human Rights Campaign to be considered the establishment, somebody's not paying close attention to how American politics works.

The White House has something in common with the rest of America, and that is disdain for Congress. It is hard to blame them.

I voted against my party with some frequency, because of my independence. I've just got to remind Missourians that I am independent and that I try to call them like I see them, and sometimes my party is wrong on some things.

If every crime victim had to have perfect judgment, we could empty our prisons.

It was a very easy way to have a group of friends on a very large campus - a sense of identity. It was a great place to learn how to navigate a variety of personalities, which you kind of have to do in life. You've got the shy woman and you've got the obnoxious woman and you've got the brainiac and you've got the social climber and you've got the introvert and the extrovert, and you're all living together. I think it gave me valuable experience in learning how to live with people that are different than you are. And that's an important lesson. You can bet it comes in very handy in the Senate.

You never know what'll happen in politics.

What? You don't trust me?

Well, Im wrestling alligators.

There's nothing that irritates Americans more than the fact that some members of Congress think they are entitled to their own set of rules. And it's true - too many people in Washington live in an alternate reality.

I'm not questioning that Donald Trump won the election. But there's nothing more sacred than our democratic process in the United States. And we have got to make sure that - put aside partisan politics and make sure that we're getting to the bottom of all of this.

There are people who have legitimate concerns about false accusations and the impact that can have on a young person's life when they have been falsely accused. Kirsten [Gillibrand] and I are not unaware that that is an issue we need to be concerned about, and that's why we have made changes in the legislation to address not just the rights of the victim, the accuser, but also of the accused.

I think people forget that when people lose Medicaid coverage, they still show up at the hospital when they have a chronic illness or a traumatic impact on their health. And those bills are paid by the hospital who then passes those costs on. They do not have a magic fairy paying the bills for people who show up without insurance. Those bills are passed on to all the people in our country that do have insurance. That's why this bill is not going to break the cycle of higher premiums - because we're going to have fewer people insured.

Mitch McConnell is a professional arm twister. He's done this for many years. He has a lot of power in his caucus.

I think we have got to call out the Republicans, where their walk doesn't match their talk, and I think we also have to make sure that we communicate clearly that we are the party that cares deeply in our core about working people in this country.

For Donald Trump to dismiss out of hand the intelligence community's fact gathering is, frankly - doesn't bode well for him protecting our country.

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate.

The price of a college education should never include a 1 in 5 chance of being sexually assaulted.

I started in the mailroom, literally, as an intern... in 1974. The legislator I was working for at the time said, 'I want you to get your law degree and come back here and get elected and be the first woman governor.' I kind of took that guy seriously - I thought that sounded like a pretty good idea.

I've tried for years to get Republicans to help us fix some of the mistakes that we made in the Affordable Care Act. There are things we can do to shore up the exchanges, to make those pools healthier, to bring down costs. I would like to see us work together on that.

I think that I was just on the cusp of the generation that was beginning to really challenge some of the assumptions about the role of women and the role of men on campus.

I don't think Democrats are ever going to get excited about cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts to wealthy people. I just don't think that's the direction we should be going in our country. The 1 percent's doing very well in America. They don't need more help. But Medicaid does.

There are three legs of the stool; spending, entitlements and making the tax code fair and equitable. That's the three legs of the stool. If we do all of those in a responsible, bipartisan way, I think the American people would all be very, very happy.

Even though we know sexual assault is still dramatically underreported, I think women are much more empowered today than they used to be.

I've been very independent from the day I arrived in Washington.

The political system loves the extremes, it doesnt so much show a lot love for the moderates.

Some of the morays have held on. When I was in school, I remember asking the question, "Why is it that whenever I walk into a fraternity there's alcohol everywhere and there's no alcohol in a sorority? Why is it that sororities won't allow alcohol, but fraternities do? What is that?" You know, nobody had a really good answer, and that's kind of held on. It's one of the issues that's being examined now - the role of alcohol in sexual assault.

I'm asking regular folks to be my super PAC.

Do I want Social Security to be there for my kids and my grandkids? Absolutely. Will I fight like a tiger to make sure that we protect Social Security? I absolutely will.

I'm the only United States Senator in the country that I'm aware of that's had the far left up on TV and the far right up on TV against me at the same time.

I know this, that there were thousands and thousands of hours given to Hillary Clinton's e-mail server and Benghazi. It seems to me we need bipartisanship now to look at exactly what happened in this election and exactly the things that people like James Comey did and put it in context to make sure we have all the facts, because I don't think anyone is comfortable with how this election played out.

I think it's important that we show up. I think it's important that we communicate directly with all those working people.

I was really shocked after all of this talk about coal miners and all of this talk about Buy America, the Republicans and the House of Representatives gutted health care and pension protections for coal miners and removed the Buy America provision that had been put in the bill in a bipartisan basis.

For Vladimir Putin to be trying to impact our elections, that - we have to - there has to be - he has to be held accountable.

By the way, this should be not only about protecting us going forward but this is a form of warfare for Vladimir Putin, who is a thug and a bully and has the friends around the globe that we don't want to be friends with.

I think Donald Trump can take major steps towards reassuring the American people that there can't even be appearance of impropriety for pay-to-play schemes under his administration.

What is most heartbreaking to me is the young women who don't report [being raped] because they were drinking, and they feel like it was their fault that they were drinking. I mean, that is so common.

You can be a victim of a crime and not exercise great judgment. And when women have been sexually assaulted, they feel like they have to have been perfect in order to have anybody believe them. They think nobody will believe them unless a stranger jumped out from behind a bush with a knife - not that they got too drunk and that a guy they thought they knew, you know, took advantage of them in a physical, assaultive way.

Universities simply unable to play judge, jury and executioner when they're already having trouble playing educator. Resources are limited and colleges must put their focus on their primary objective: education.

The goal is not to just have rapists expelled from schools. I don't want rapists transferring schools. I don't want them out there, being able to commit these crimes. I want them to go to prison. But if you understand this crime and you understand what happens in the reporting of this crime and the support that a victim does or does not get, you realize that our legislation increases the likelihood that a young woman will go to the police in a timely manner and that the police will investigate and that they will be able to administer real justice in the criminal system.

The notion that the campus has its hands tied if a woman is not willing to go to the police, if the woman is only willing to go so far as, "I just don't want to see him in my dorm anymore," is ridiculous. If that's as far as she's willing to go, then we need to accommodate that. And a university needs to be able to accommodate it.

I want to compliment the fraternity and sorority organizations for taking the time to meet with us and then removing their support from the legislation that would have been so counterproductive for a goal that I think we all share - and that is making campuses safer and the successful prosecution of people who commit serious crimes. So, good on them that they backed off, and we don't have to fight them.

I just think it's weird that Donald Trump wants to be an executive producer of a TV show while he's President of the United States. I agree with Newt Gingrich. He doesn't have to do that.

I believe that sexual assault - if this is possible - was even more underreported when I was in school.

Obviously, I have been a pro-choice candidate for my entire political career, and obviously there is controversy always surrounding this issue.

First of all, Donald Trump cabinet or - I call it the 3-G cabinet, Goldman, generals and gazillionaires. And I think it's one of the things that for someone who has worked around the world for profit, it is different than working around the world to make sure we have strong alliances and to make sure that we are in the strongest position to protect our country.

It's very hard from a distance to figure out who has lost their minds. One party, the other party, all of us, the president.