If you count all the members of the Senate, party members vote with the party 84.4% of the time.
How does that compare to Sen McCaskill?
Right there on the average at 84.2%
Democratic Senators vote with the party 87.5% of the time so she's a little below average there.
Ah, but scratch the surface and see what you think.
If you rank the Senators from top to bottom in voting with the party, she comes in at #79, thus, there are 78 Senators with a higher level of voting with the party than Sen McCaskill.
Who might some of these Senators be?
Kit Bond at 86.1%.
Joe Lierberman is at 86.5%.
JOE LIEBERMAN?!!!!!!!
Give. Me. A. Break.
And even tho she votes most often with Jim Webb, he's at 90.5% of voting with the Party.
As a former VA resident, there are a lot of demographic commonalities with Missouri in terms of voting patterns. And Jim Webb definitely ran as more of a conservative Democrat that did Sen McCaskill.
And yet, here we are looking at someone who's not voted the way she ran during her campaign and who can point to JOE FUCKING LIEBERMANN as someone who votes "more Democratic" than the junior senator from Missouri.
Again, I don't expect her to be Dick Durbin (he votes with the Dems 97.5% of the time) but I don't expect her to:
a) stray from the party line more than Jim Webb,
b) stray from the party line more than Joe Liberman, and
c) stray from the party line on issues like the 4th Amendment, holding the Executive Branch accountable and yunno, all those other pesky little constitutional issues she claimed in 06 she'd stand up for.
I'd probably be okay-ish with her "right on average" voting pattern if she voted with the Dems on the high profile issues like FISA and Iraq funding. But clearly she's not going to do that. Instead, all we'll get out of her is some tut-tutting like this about her vote(s) for the FISA bill:
"I'm not thrilled," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. "There are some changes we need to make to make sure that American citizens are protected. But it's a lot better than a lot of things that have been forced down this Congress' throat right before recesses that trampled on American's liberties."
I guess that puts her in the Sternly Worded Letter camp of the Congressional Democrats. And we all know how (in)effective that strategery is.
What a world we live in. She's rapidly becoming a "more Democrat". She sure as hell ain't showing a lot of "better Democrat".
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