U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill on Partisanship

MCCASKILL: I still believe there’s a wide swath of voters in America that don’t look through the lens of political party but look through the lens of, “Well, what do you actually getting done,” even though the noise is generated by the ends. The elections are decided by those folks in the middle. And we had a moderate an Arizona, a Democrat win in a state that hasn’t had a Democratic senator for many years. I do believe that our next election cycle there will be more and more people that will go, “OK. We’re worn out with all of this. We’re worn out with the tweets. We’re worn out with the food fight between the Democrats and the Republicans. Let’s try to get behind someone who can knit this thing together and get back to the days where everyone realizes that compromise was actually part of our founding fathers most important idea for this country.”

AMANPOUR: And yet, it is blatantly and blaringly absent today and you have tweeted, in fact, just this week, just yesterday, you tweeted, “So sad that our dinner to say good bye to senators who are leaving is not bipartisan. If we cannot be together to even recognize those who are leaving, what hope is there for this place? Why didn’t it happen? Two words, Mitch McConnell.” I mean, that’s pretty bizarre.

MCCASKILL: Yes, it is. And he made this decision when they took over the majority a few years ago said that we were no longer going to have this dinner together. He certainly has the power to say, “You know, I made a mistake, let’s bring everybody together and do this dinner together,” and he has not done that. And I think it’s a terrible commentary on what this place has come to that we can’t even get together to wish — I mean, you know, Bob Corker is a good friend of mine, my Republican colleague who’s retiring. Jeff Flake and I have worked together on many things. Orrin Hatch and I are buddies, we don’t agree on everything but we’re buddies. And the notion that we can’t all be together and wish each other well on an evening like that, the American people ought to be mad about it and they ought to express that to Mitch McConnell in every way that they can.