Claire McCaskill Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

I worry about the lack of experience that Rex Tillerson has had on the diplomatic front and, frankly, I think that's true for many of the appointments to [Donald] Trump's cabinet.

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

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.

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

I think I'm the last Democrat left in the Senate after Russ Feingold was defeated that won't take earmarks.

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.

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

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 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.

If you are passed out drunk or if there is a gun to your head, it is the same crime. It is a crime where there is not consent. It is a felony. And we need to start making sure victims understand that, so they don't do the self blame.

You never know what'll happen in politics.

I am a small-town girl.

All the movies where I play nice guys don't seem to do very well.

No commander in chief would ever say, "I'm not going to listen to the guys on the ground."

Frankly, earmarking is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem.

They [people from the Donald Trump cabinet] haven't had experience in the areas that they're being asked to manage in a very complicated world and a very complicated government.

What? You don't trust me?

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

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.

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

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 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.

Well, Im wrestling alligators.

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.

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.

I think it's important that we show up.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

So it is the business community and agricultural community who I think might have the most influence on helping us make this effort more bipartisan.

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.

Somehow in the public sector, if you start in the mailroom and spend your life getting promoted, it's unseemly.