McCaskill, in final Senate floor visit, draws rebuke from McConnell

Dec. 21--WASHINGTON -- Sen. Claire McCaskill told the Post-Dispatch earlier this month she was going to save her more robust Twitter commentary for next year, after she leaves the Senate, when the mouth she said gets her into trouble wouldn't matter to her political aspirations.

But if McCaskill's intention was to leave office quietly -- well, that didn't happen.

After what the outgoing Missouri senator said was her last act from the Senate floor Thursday -- posting video from the floor while it was not in session -- McCaskill drew a rebuke from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

McCaskill said in a tweet that McConnell's office registered a complaint with the Senate Sergeant at Arms, which enforces the rules of the Senate.

"I want to apologize," McCaskill tweeted. "It will never happen again."

The post drew overwhelmingly favorable hoots from McCaskill's Twitter admirers. One declared: "McConnell should focus on funding the government."

But the rules of the Senate -- as arcane and outdated as they may seem in this video age -- are also part of the traditions of the Senate that McCaskill said she honored when she gave her final floor speech last week.

McCaskill said then that she didn't really feel like giving a farewell speech but did so because "I have seen so many Senate traditions crumble over the last 12 years."

In this case, McCaskill was violating Rule IV of the Senate, which says: "The taking of pictures of any kind is prohibited in the Senate Chamber, the Senate Reading Rooms (Marble Room and Lobby), the Senate Cloakrooms, and the Private Dining Room of the Senate."

"First of all, Sen. McConnell didn't speak with her," McConnell's spokesman, Don Stewart, said in an email. "But as she knows, it's Rule IV of the Rules for Regulation of the Senate Wing of the United States Capitol and Senate Office Buildings."

McCaskill told the Post-Dispatch earlier this month she planned to wait until leaving office to "take the bark off the tree" on Twitter. Her successor, Republican Josh Hawley, who defeated her in November, will take office Jan. 3.

On Twitter and in interviews with an array of media outlets, McCaskill has been increasingly critical of Hawley's future Senate Republicans colleagues, President Trump, and her Democratic Party.

After President Donald Trump surprised the world, and even his advisers, when he announced a troop withdrawal from Syria, she tweeted: "President Trump appears to have 2 kinds of advisors, those that are indicted and those that are ignored."

McCaskill's tweet-taunt of McConnell followed tweets earlier this week directed at Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ben Sasse of Nebraska for not sufficiently bucking President Donald Trump, or for not understanding that Trump didn't listen to his advisers before announcing a troop withdrawal from Syria.

McCaskill had this to say on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" last week: "I believe that history will judge down the line those members of the Republican Party who have silently looked down and think they can wait this out without ever speaking up about the level of lying that goes on" in the Trump administration.

This week, McCaskill gave an interview to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in which she compared Trump's surprising withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria to the "Wag the Dog" movie. She chastised her own party for not understanding how difficult it is for Democrats to win in conservative or middle-of-the-road states when the party, elsewhere, is moving leftward on economic issues and maintains a rigid ideology on social policy.

Asked in a New York Times podcast released Thursday why she didn't talk more about abortion rights in her re-election campaign, she said that her record on the issue was clear over almost 40 years of public service, and in socially conservative Missouri, it was "not an issue that was going to bring me more votes."

Acknowledging she was irritated, she said in the podcast those who told the Times that they faulted her for not focusing more on abortion rights were "young women who have not spent any time outside the group of people who agree with them."

"Getting things done means you can't be extreme or pure," she said.

Watch McCaskill's farewell speech

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