Missouri Democratic senator Claire McCaskill has been running aggressively toward the political center to save her seat in Tuesday’s election. She appeared on Fox News last week to separate herself from “crazy Democrats” who scream at Republicans in restaurants. Without calling them crazy, McCaskill immediately then distinguished herself from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Asked if she regretted backing Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016, McCaskill told Bret Baier of Fox News’s Special Report: “That’s a hard question.”
McCaskill’s rhetorical moves to the center can’t mask her very liberal record on many issues. She voted against Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. While red-state Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana voted in favor of banning most abortions after the fifth month of pregnancy, when some infants are able to survive outside the womb, McCaskill voted against it. (Pro-choice advocates like Nancy Pelosi have been unable to explain the difference between late-term abortion and infanticide.)
When I asked McCaskill after a press conference Monday afternoon in Columbia if there were any federal limit on late-term abortion she could support, she replied: “Who are you with?”
When I informed her I work for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, McCaskill said: “You know what? You know what we’re not doing? We are not doing national stuff this week if we can possibly keep from it. I’m all about Missouri this week.”
That’s not quite true. McCaskill’s three press conferences were open to national press on Monday—she had happily taken questions earlier in the day in St. Louis from well-known NBC analyst John Heilemann, and, perhaps not quite as happily, from me.
In 2016, the Democratic party platform, for the first time, explicitly called for a repeal of the Hyde amendment, which prohibits federal funding of elective abortions for Medicaid recipients. Joe Manchin called that change to the party platform “crazy,” while McCaskill was silent on the matter at the time.
Asked at the St. Louis press conference if she supports the Hyde amendment, McCaskill dodged the question multiple times before finally endorsing the general prohibition on federal funding of abortion for Medicaid recipients.
“I do not think it is something that we should be spending federal money on,” McCaskill said.
Here’s a transcript of McCaskill’s comments at the brief St. Louis press conference:
MCCASKILL: My view on that whole topic is we should make sure that we never cut off funding for birth control. Birth control is how we prevent abortions, and that’s what’s been frustrating—my opponent in that he believes that the federal money that helps women access birth control should be cut off, so he’s pretty extreme.
TWS: But specifically could you answer “yes” or “no” on the Hyde amendment, one way or the other, would you vote to repeal it or not?
MCCASKILL: I’ve never voted to repeal it.
TWS: But would you?
MCCASKILL: I don’t believe that’s gonna come up, and I don’t believe that—
TWS: But can you say yes or no?
MCCASKILL: I do not think that it is something that we should be spending federal money on.
Repealing the Hyde amendment is a top priority for organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL that back McCaskill, and Democrats will likely attempt to repeal it the next time they control Congress and the White House.
While McCaskill has never voted specifically on repealing the Hyde amendment as it applies to Medicaid, she did vote against permanently applying the Hyde amendment to a smaller health care program (the Indian Health Service) in 2008. Nine Democratic senators, including some who described themselves as “pro-choice,” voted in favor of that measure.
McCaskill also voted for Obamacare, which provides taxpayer-funding for insurance plans that cover elective abortions. She has voted to keep federal “family planning” funding for Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in America.
