Claire McCaskill Quotes

You can never solve a problem without talking to people with whom you disagree. The United States Senate is predicated and based on consensus building. That was certainly the vision of the founding fathers.

The Senate of the United States has been both extravagantly praised and unreasonably disparaged, according to the predisposition and temper of its various critics…. The truth is, in this case as in so many others, something quite commonplace and practical. The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it.

In the Senate, where 60 votes are required to do anything important, you have to work with your colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

In all political regulations, good cannot be complete, it can only be predominant.

The Senate was designed not to be efficient. If was designed to slow things down, And it does a pretty good job of it.

The Senate is indeed a deliberative body, and that quality serves the nation well. A slow-moving government helps us maintain a stable government. But slow moving is not the same as immobile.

Our Founding Fathers created the United States Senate for the purpose of protecting the rights of the minority.

If we’re going to do all the things that the Constitution says that legitimately we can do as a country, … we have to be able to have a Congress where people can talk together like our Founding Fathers did.

Eliminating the filibuster would eliminate the people’s voices in the Senate.

We [Congress] are proving inadequate not only to our most difficult problems but also to routine duties. Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important. […] That’s not how we were meant to govern. Our entire system of government — with its checks and balances, its bicameral Congress, its protections of the rights of the minority — was designed for compromise.

When you have a Senate that is 50 Democrats and 49 Republicans and one independent, it's quite obvious that the only way we are going to get something done is if we work together.

The Senate is a remarkable institution. It is unique. There is no other body, no other political body, no other democratic legislature in the world quite like the U.S. Senate.

The job of a leader, the job of a governor, the job of a president, is to get the people in the room and bang enough heads together and rub enough arms and cajole enough to have them put the country and the state's greater interest ahead of their own personal partisan interest. That's what we did in New Jersey and that's the model for America.

One of the reasons that the Senate was structured and founded the way it is, as opposed to the House, it was designed for gridlock. It was designed to stop massive new laws being passed and voted on daily. It was designed to stop the growth of government.

I think if you're going to get anything done in the Senate, you have to be on the same sheet of music. If you don't get people on the same sheet of music it comes out pretty horrible.

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.

I've thought about it, not a lot, but I thought my relationship with Congress - the Democrats and Republicans - would help me get some things done. Not everything, but at least they'd be willing to try.

In the United States Senate, we cannot do great things without reaching across the aisle and working together - and I look forward to the challenges ahead.

One reason the Founding Fathers thought that states should have two senators was so that smaller states wouldn't get run over and could bring their interests to the attention of the Senate more broadly.

The United States Senate wasn't designed to be a majority-rule institution. It was designed to include and accommodate the rights of the minority in small states as well as large states.

The danger of what's happening right now in terms of using reconciliation is, the purpose of the Senate is going to be defeated. And that is to bring consensus to big issues in this country so that we have a reasoned and thoughtful approach and that the American public buys into it.

Bipartisanship is “the oil of national government.”

[Describing how Congress functions:] ... the way the Founding Fathers intended—not very well. They understood that if you move too quickly, our democracy will be less responsible to the majority.

You can't have your own way in Congress.

You can't write laws in America if you don't compromise.