The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: claire mccaskill
Senator Claire McCaskill

WATCH Former Senator Offers Roadmap To Indicting Trump

As more information becomes available about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, questions are surfacing beyond President Donald Trump's role, including what he was doing for hours while even his political allies were begging him to intervene.

Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Monday, former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who is also a former state prosecutor, explained what she would encourage Attorney General Merrick Garland to do in terms of persuading members of a grand jury to indict Trump criminally. She encouraged prosecutors to walk jurors through what it looked like in those moments when Trump was watching television coverage of the riots.

According to those who were there in the White House on Jan. 6, Trump was glued to the TV, excited over what his supporters were doing for him. What McCaskill explained is that the text messages, emails, phone calls and desperate requests for help he and his staff were getting are all evidence of Trump's malicious intent.

"We can go through and we can put the images at a specific time," she explained. "And we can then fill in the text messages, the phone calls that were flooding the White House saying, get him to call them off. Now, what was he watching on TV at those moments? He was watching windows being broken. He was watching police officers being stabbed with flag poles. He was watching people hang from the balcony in the Senate. He was watching people carry around government property proudly like trophies in the capital. And, frankly, he was watching a confrontation at the door of the House where someone was killed."

According to the accounts of those present, Trump loved it.

"Give me those facts. Give me those timelines, and give me a jury," McCaskill said. "I'm just telling you, any responsible leader would want to end the violence, not provoke it. That's what he did that day, and that's what this committee is going to layout. And that's where Merrick Garland is either going to rise to the occasion or go down in infamy as one of the worst attorney generals in this country's history."

Watch the entire interview below:

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Senator McCaskill To Be Absent For Three Weeks For Cancer Treatment

Senator McCaskill To Be Absent For Three Weeks For Cancer Treatment

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Senator Claire McCaskill will be absent from Congress for the next three weeks as she undergoes treatment for breast cancer, the Missouri Democrat wrote in a blog post on Monday.

McCaskill, who leads the Senate Special Committee on Aging, said she will post online how she would have voted on any matters that come up during her absence and will submit questions in writing for any missed hearings.

“It’s a little scary, but my prognosis is good and I expect a full recovery,” McCaskill wrote.

(Reporting by Megan Cassella; Editing by Eric Walsh)

Photo: Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee questions a witness in Washington July 17, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

McCaskill: How To Win Elections And Manipulate The Other Party

McCaskill: How To Win Elections And Manipulate The Other Party

Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is offering the world a truly great political lesson in how to troll the opposition.

McCaskill just published in Politico Magazine an excerpt from her upcoming book, in which she describes in exhaustive detail how she secured re-election in 2012: She engineered the victory in the Republican primary of the extreme religious-right candidate, Todd Akin, who went on to destroy any chance of a Republican win with his infamous comment falsely alleging that “legitimate rape” could not result in pregnancy. McCaskill won the election with 55 percent of the vote to Akin’s 39 percent, even as Mitt Romney carried the state with 54 percent in the presidential race.

It’s a truly remarkable political narrative — the kind that you wouldn’t expect to see from someone until after they’ve left public office. The book is called Plenty Ladylike — a reference to a comment Akin made during the general campaign, when he said that McCaskill had been “more ladylike” during her first Senate race in 2006.

McCaskill first boosted Akin in the primary with attacks on his ultra-conservatism — and when it worked, she celebrated in style:

It was August 7, 2012, and I was standing in my hotel room in Kansas City about to shotgun a beer for the first time in my life. I had just made the biggest gamble of my political career — a $1.7 million gamble — and it had paid off. Running for re-election to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Missouri, I had successfully manipulated the Republican primary so that in the general election I would face the candidate I was most likely to beat. And this is how I had promised my daughters we would celebrate.

This could be a cautionary tale for conservatives: Whenever liberals start expressing outrage about a right-wing candidate in the Republican primary — whether it’s Todd Akin or, say, Donald Trump — maybe they’re really just waving a big red cape and hoping the conservative base will charge right at it.

McCaskill ran this ad about Akin, lambasting him as “the most conservative congressman in Missouri,” “a crusader against bigger government,” having a “pro-family agenda” to outlaw contraception, and absolutely hating President Obama. “Missouri’s true conservative,” the ad said, “is just too conservative.”

“As it turned out,” she boasts, “we spent more money for Todd Akin in the last two weeks of the primary than he spent on his whole primary campaign.”

The ad is still viewable on the McCaskill campaign’s YouTube account.

McCaskill even got messages through to Akin’s people through intermediaries — including one direct conversation between her own pollster and the Akin campaign — about which ads he should be running. “This was the most fun I’d had in a long time.”

All of this brought her to the night of the Republican primary, when she watched the results with an intense focus. “That day — August 7, 2012 — felt like my own election, even though I had no opponent in the Democratic primary,” she writes. “Never before had I been so engaged and so committed to another’s race.”

McCaskill also includes some serious trolling of Akin’s religious, even messianic delusions about himself:

I do believe his nomination reaffirmed more than ever his conviction that a higher power had chosen him for this race. For Akin, government service is defined and guided by his religious faith. He was known to start committee meetings with prayers that included “in Jesus’ name.” He’d made religion a centerpiece of his campaign, saying his faith got him into politics and directed the things he did once in office. In my opinion his belief that he is a “holy warrior” doing battle with the forces of evil liberalism blinded him to the realities of political life and what might be best for his party. In the first lines of his election-night speech, he thanked God for hearing the prayers of his supporters and granting him victory. He probably didn’t realize that we had also been praying for his victory.

Yes, Akin’s victory in the GOP primary was brought about by a higher power — the McCaskill for Senate campaign committee.

Photo: Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) via Facebook.

ViaPolitico Magazine

Blunt In Middle Of Fight Over Dietary Guidelines, Environmental Concerns

Blunt In Middle Of Fight Over Dietary Guidelines, Environmental Concerns

By Chuck Raasch, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt is in the middle of a fight over the government’s dietary guidelines, which are slated to be updated this year.

House and Senate spending bills working their way through Congress have recently been altered to include language saying that a government committee’s consumption recommendations for Americans went too far afield from the science of nutrition in suggesting that plant-based foods are better for the environment than red meat.

Blunt and at least 28 Senate Republican colleagues, along with Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, have expressed concerns about the recommendations made by the committee of outside advisers, which spent months considering the changes.

Blunt, R-Mo., shepherded a Senate Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bill out of committee last month with a rider saying new diet recommendations should be based “only on a preponderance of nutritional and scientific evidence.” Two House appropriations bills have similar language.

Blunt and the 29 other senators signed a letter in March challenging the “scientific integrity of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s recommendations to remove ‘lean meat’ from the statement of a healthy dietary pattern.”

The letter also expressed strong concerns that the committee, comprising outside experts pulled together by the departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, was “going beyond its purview of nutrition and health research to include topics such as sustainability.”

Blunt said: “The proposed dietary guidelines would expand the advisory committee’s scope well beyond the statute and well beyond dietary guidelines and nutrition into unrelated issues, which is not the job of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.”

A coalition of health and nutrition groups disagrees. The group — ranging from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the Center for Science in the Public Interest — called the language in the appropriations bills “a ham-fisted attempt on the part of powerful special interests, led by the meat industry, to have politicians meddle in the government’s nutrition advice.”

Many of the signers of the March letter represent beef-producing states in the Midwest and West. They complained that the committee was ignoring “scientific evidence that shows the role of lean red meats as part of a healthy diet.”

Missouri Democrats have pointed out that Blunt’s wife, Abigail, lobbies for the Kraft Heinz Co. A subsidiary, Oscar Mayer, is a top producer of processed meat. Missouri Democratic Party spokesman Chris Hayden said it was a “wildly inappropriate conflict of interest” for Blunt to spearhead support of red meat in the new diet debates.

Sen. Blunt said his position “represents a widely held, bipartisan viewpoint, and it’s also included in two House appropriation bills.”

Recently merged Kraft Heinz reported that what was then known as Kraft Foods spent $300,000 on lobbying on the dietary guidelines and other issues the first three months of 2015, but said that Abigail Blunt did not lobby the Senate.

“Our company’s objective is to help ensure the” recommendations “are science-based and within the jurisdiction of the guidelines,” said Basil Maglaris, director of corporate affairs for Kraft Heinz.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said she agreed with Blunt that a healthy diet and agricultural sustainability should not be co-mingled.

“The environmental concerns — obviously there is a place for that — but I don’t think that mixing the two makes much sense,” McCaskill said. But she said she is opposed to attaching the restricting language on appropriations bills, saying it was symptomatic of a larger trend by Republicans to retreat from “earmark” reforms and attach unrelated legislation to spending bills.

Photo: Should the government continue to support red meat — or at least support it less? stu_spivack/Flickr