Claire McCaskill Quotations

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.

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

Respecting the Second Amendment does not mean abandoning common sense. The right to own guns in this country must remain, while we also must strengthen our laws to prevent mass shootings.

The political system loves the extremes, it doesn't 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.

When I was a prosecutor in Kansas City, my job was to fight for justice and safety for all citizens in my community. Equal access to justice under the law is an American value embedded in the fabric of our legal and political system - the idea that anybody, powerful or not, can have their day in court.

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.

We shouldn't deny the right of the minority to filibuster, but we need to do a much better job of making them own it. That way, the American people could figure out who is being obstructionist and who is willing to compromise.

Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.

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?

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

What we have done with No Child Left Behind is squeeze the creativity out of the classroom because teachers have begun to just teaching to the test.

Being a new mother was a joyful and sometimes overwhelming experience - and as the first Missouri female state legislator to have a baby while in office, having heath care for myself and my son gave me some needed peace of mind.

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 think there are certain folks in Missouri that don't trust government. And they haven't trusted government for a long time.

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

My first obligation is my job. It's very hard to really get into campaign mode when you've got to focus on doing the work.

We need candidate schools to recruit more young African-Americans to run for office and more diverse law enforcement communities.

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

Clearly, a large number of African-Americans don't have faith that the laws are being executed fairly in Ferguson, and that's a problem... We need to ensure Africans-Americans feel confident in the rule of law.

Corporate governance is a huge issue too. We don't have women on these corporate boards. More than half of the students in law school are women, more than half of the women, I think, in medical school now are women.

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 never need to go far if I need a reminder of how important Medicare and Social Security are to Missouri's seniors. My mom, Betty Anne, is one of millions for whom these services provide a reliable safety net. Across the country, these protections are an integral part of sustaining millions of seniors' health and dignity.

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.

When I was a single, working mom with a newborn, I learned just how vital it is to have comprehensive, affordable health care.

Many countries struggle and never get to the point where people have faith that laws are executed fairly.

So I think that this is wrong, and common sense tells us it?s wrong. And I?m worried that the president is going to bully this through and the impact that has.

Only in Washington would the Republican operatives get the entire press corps ginned up over the notion that I'm going to be home campaigning instead of going to a bunch of worthless parties at a convention that's only being held to do something we all know is going to happen anyway.

I was in the room with, you know, more than a dozen Republicans trying to negotiate the stimulus. Most of them decided the politics of the situation meant they should walk away, even if it wasn't responsible in terms of what our country needed right then.

I think, first of all, you know, Washington has a bad habit of a very short attention span.

You know, we've got to be responsible about our debt. We don't want the United States to ever be a dead beat, and not be able to pay its bills, either to our soldiers who are fighting or to Social Security recipients.

You know I think the president has to really focus on getting elected to a second term in 2012. And I need to focus on making sure I'm accountable to the people of Missouri.

We still have not been able to move into those positions in our country that are really directing traffic among that 1 percent, and that's where women have to break through.

We work for the public, and I believe that if a senator wants to block a piece of legislation or a nominee, they owe the public an explanation.

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

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What? You don't trust me?

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

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

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.

I have been very independent from day I arrived in Washington.

I do not begrudge Bill Clinton's working for his wife, but the one thing I would say is really important to President Clinton to think about right now, because of the larger megaphone he has as a former president, he really needs to be careful with the truth.

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.

Well, Im wrestling alligators.

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

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.

I am a small-town girl.

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.

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.

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

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

You never know what'll happen in politics.

You have to be willing to offend in order to make progress.

We have a lot of things we give away to people who are very, very wealthy in this country. And I'm not sure that our federal government can afford that.

After holding hearings to get input from Missourians, I led the fight to pass legislation that protects seniors from predatory lending in the mortgage industry. I stood up against efforts that would make it harder for seniors to vote, and battled telemarketers bent on defrauding seniors.

As a member of the Aging Committee, I'm no stranger to fighting for America's seniors.

The Missourians I hear from just don't buy the idea that the only way to tackle the national debt is to drastically alter Medicare and Social Security.

This current culture of corruption has helped Missouri families see that it is lobbyists with too much access and influence to members of Congress who are cutting these sweetheart deals at their expense, and they are calling for action to put a stop to it.

It seems to me that before we give federal funds to police departments, we ought to mandate that they have body cams.

It's very American, making a lot of money.

The NRA grades senators and representatives based on their votes on gun issues - and even on issues that have little-to-nothing to do with guns.

The U.S. military is the best-trained, most effective fighting force the world has ever known. And the conduct of the vast majority of our service members makes Americans rightfully proud.

I'm going to work with Republicans when they do things I agree with and I'm going to fight Republicans when they're doing things that I think are damaging.

I just want to make sure that they feel comfortable that I am ready to take these folks on, that I am ready to be on their side, that I can do this. And that means listening to them and reassuring them that I'm not going to be afraid to say no to anybody in my party, anybody in the Republican Party or any lobbyist.

If you look through history, all of the great work we've done in Congress has been around a table of compromise, when it comes to the most difficult problems.

His comments during his confirmation hearing and his record indicate that he is not someone who would defend civil rights and that he would side in favor of big business over the consumer and presidential power over individual rights.

I don't know how anyone can keep a straight face and say they are for deficit reduction while they insist on a permanent tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, completely unpaid for.

The UAE was one of three nations in the world that recognized the Taliban.

Along with my colleagues Mark Warner and Sheldon Whitehouse, I have been working to end the process of secret holds, which is when senators anonymously block legislation or nominations without explanation.