This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 11, 2011 - WASHINGTON - When U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and her Senate allies declared victory Monday in their year-long campaign to replace the government watchdog who was supposed to root out waste and fraud in the $56 billion Afghanistan reconstruction, neither the scenario nor the players fit predictable party lines.
The target of the Senate group's persistent criticism has been President Barack Obama's administration, which had stubbornly resisted firing Arnold Fields, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. Late Monday, the administration announced Fields' resignation in a statement that praised him for leading "the effort to provide comprehensive and independent oversight" in Afghanistan.
All three of McCaskill's main Senate allies -- in calling for Fields' resignation, criticizing his office's lackluster work and issuing Monday's victory-declaring news release -- were Republicans. They included one of the chamber's most fiscally conservative members, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, as well as Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Susan Collins of Maine.
McCaskill, a former Missouri state auditor, has cultivated a sort of watchdog independence in her work as chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's contracting oversight subcommittee, which has revealed deficiencies in SIGAR and investigated complaints about contracting and gravesite management at Arlington National Cemetery that led to a bipartisan bill approved last month.
Her focus on government waste and abuse is a key part of the Missouri Democrat's effort to stake ground as a centrist in Congress on some fiscal issues, as a determined opponent of earmarked appropriations, and as an activist in reforming Senate rules such as the "secret holds" that allow individual senators to block legislation or presidential nominees. The subcommittee's first hearing this year will examine on how the government audits federal contracts.
McCaskill, an early and strong backer of Obama's 2008 campaign, also has sought to put some distance between herself and the White House. Previously, she supported key elements of the president's legislative priorities, such as last year's health-care overhaul, the economic stimulus plan and Wall Street regulation. But the senator points out that she voted against the White House on the second round of the "cash for clunkers" auto subsidy and voted no on the Democrats' omnibus spending bills. She also opposed the House-passed "cap and trade" energy bill, which died when the Senate took no action.
"If you ask [Obama], he would say, 'I never count on Claire McCaskill's vote on anything.' He knows that," McCaskill said in an interview with the Beacon. "He knows me and knows that I am independent before I am anything else. I'm not afraid to swim upstream, I'm not afraid to be a lonely voice."
Last week, the Wall Street Journal listed McCaskill as one of seven Senate Democrats from swing states or generally conservative states who appear to be the most likely to back away from supporting Obama's positions when some key votes come up in this Congress.
The article mentioned that McCaskill "led efforts to cut $30 billion from Mr. Obama's 2011 budget request" last year -- a reference to her alliance with conservative Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., to push for Senate adoption of plans to restrict increases in non-defense discretionary spending to an average of 1 percent and cap defense spending at an average of 1.7 percent a year over the next three years.
Asked if the White House should be worried about her votes in the new Congress, McCaskill said in the interview with the Beacon: "I think that President Obama has probably been worried about me from Day One. Keep in mind that I served with Barack Obama in the Senate, and he and I voted differently on a lot of things."
Health-Care Overhaul
But they both supported last year's health-care overhaul, which has become a lightning rod for controversy across the nation. With surveys in Missouri showing that the individual insurance mandate and some other parts of the health policy restructuring are unpopular, McCaskill's critics have been scrutinizing every word she utters on the topic for evidence that she might be changing her position.
Last week, blogs on both the left and the right -- responding to comments the senator made on MSNBC -- questioned whether she had changed position on the new health-care law's provision that would require most Americans to buy health insurance by 2014. McCaskill and others have said the proviso is an unpopular but necessary way to prevent insurers from barring coverage on pre-existing conditions.
A spokeswoman said McCaskill's position has not changed: Recognizing that the mandate is unpopular, the senator believes that "if there are other ways to stop insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, it's worth considering."
On a wider question, McCaskill has said that, in retrospect, the White House may have moved too quickly to push the health-care overhaul last spring, before the nation's economic problems had been fully addressed.
"Moving into health care at that particular time, I think, was very difficult," she said on Fox News Sunday in late November, when pressed to name a "conceptual area" in which Obama had been wrong. The timing of the vote was off, she said, "because Americans were feeling the sting of the economic downturn and unemployment. ... I think many of those things didn't get the focus they should have at that point in time."
Walking the Walk?
McCaskill's Republican critics are gearing up for what she herself predicts will be a tough re-election campaign in 2012. They contend that the outspoken senator is simply re-positioning herself politically to reflect the realities of Missouri.
"She will try to move herself as an independent or moderate, but she's got a voting record and a direct loyalty and attachment to Barack Obama that she cannot disclaim," former Missouri Republican Party Chairman Ann Wagner told the Beacon in November. Wagner has not ruled out a possible run against McCaskill if her bid to become chairman of the Republican National Committee falls short next week.
Former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman already has announced her candidacy, and former U.S. Sen. Jim Talent has said he is considering a run.
McCaskill contends that she staked out her ground as a centrist and fiscally moderate senator from the start. "As much as some of my political opponents want to say this is something I found lately, it doesn't take too much digging to realize that I've staked out a pretty moderate position on fiscal matters," she said.
"I think if you compare my votes -- vote to vote -- with my Republican colleague over the last four years, in many ways I would be the fiscal conservative in the delegation," she said. Why? "Because I didn't do earmarking from Day One, I began working on contracting oversight from Day One, and the massive amount of money that has been wasted in bad contracting processes and procedures, particularly in the wars. I have voted no on a number of appropriations bills, I voted no on ... the big catch-all spending bills."
McCaskill said that "part of that [fiscal moderation] comes from my auditor's background and part of that comes from that fact that I'm from Missouri and that's who I am" -- taking a Show Me attitude on spending. "On matters of how we spend money. I've worked hard to make sure I give money back from my office budget every year."
Is McCaskill walking the walk -- or just talking the talk -- about being a centrist who is capable of bucking the White House on some key issues this year? One indication is whether she tends to vote in line with the Democratic majority position in the Senate.
By the Numbers
In the 111th Congress, which ended last month, McCaskill's percentage of "party-line" votes was the fourth-lowest among the 65 Democratic senators who served over those two years, according to a Washington Post database.
While the Missouri senator's party-line percentage might appear high at first blush -- agreeing with Democratic leaders on 81 percent of 673 votes -- many of those votes were routine and procedural. The database showed that, only three other Democratic senators bucked their leaders more often in the last two years: former Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. (at 79.9 percent); former Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind. (72.4 percent) and conservative Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb. (68.9 percent).
By comparison, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate leadership, voted with the party position 97.5 percent of the time. The average party-line percentage among Senate Democrats was 90.3 percent.
On questions of voting on economic issues, McCaskill's record is murkier. According to the National Journal's "Conservative on Economic Policy" calculations, McCaskill voted more conservative on economic policy issues than 54 percent of senators in 2009. (Numbers for 2010 were not available.) That places her in the centrist category on such issues, although she is closer to the liberal end on non-fiscal issues.
Last year, Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that bills itself as a budget watchdog, gave McCaskill and U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., an award "for their tenacity fighting for transparent and accountable federal spending -- tackling earmark reform, seeking to decrease the influence of special interests, and working on behalf of taxpayers."
And McCaskill says her subcommittee work on waste and fraud in Afghanistan contracts will end up saving taxpayers money. After the outgoing watchdog Fields announced his resignation, McCaskill issued a statement Monday evening saying she hoped "that his departure will allow the agency to turn over a new leaf and finally begin to do the important contracting oversight work we so desperately need."
In an interview last week, McCaskill told the Beacon that she was "very disappointed in how the White House has managed this. I think they've made a big mistake in not moving quickly to remove Gen. Fields once it was obvious that he was not the right person for the job."
Early this year, her subcommittee plans a hearing on "how much audit work on contracts is actually being done by federal agencies." While the Defense Contract Audit Agency focuses on Pentagon audits, McCaskill said "we have nothing like that for [the rest of] the federal government. Sometimes an investment in good auditors produces a very good return for taxpayers."
Seeking Bipartisan Progress
McCaskill said she wants to work more often with moderate Senate Republicans to try to get things done in this Congress. "Obviously, we can't get anything passed without some bipartisan support," she said.
One example was the bipartisan bill she authored with Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., that aims to straighten out questionable contracting practices and the mismanagement of gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery. The bill was approved by Congress in December and signed into law by Obama, but McCaskill wants to "make sure that we continue to follow up. ... I'm still not convinced that we shouldn't turn over the day-to-day management of Arlington to the Veterans Administration" rather than the Army.
In another bipartisan effort, McCaskill joined with Coburn -- one of the Senate's most conservative cost-cutters -- in offering an unsuccessful amendment in November to convince the Senate to ban all earmarks. "It's so arbitrary. It's not the merit of the project -- it's who you are and who you know," she said. "And that's why I think it's such a flawed process."
The earmark issue is expected to be less prominent in the new Congress, mainly because both House and Senate Republicans have agreed to an earmark moratorium. But McCaskill said she would continue to oppose such projects if they come up. "I'm saying we need to spend the people's money on a merit-based process, not on a state being lucky enough to have somebody on the right committee, with the right seniority, that's the right political party, who knows the right lobbyists."
One initiative that McCaskill has so far had trouble convincing most Republican to support is the amendment she is sponsoring with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to ban senators from placing "secret holds" on bill or nominees. That measure is expected to come to a vote later this month along with other proposed changes in Senate rules.
"We have allowed people to secretly hold nominations and the people's business, and there have been members trying to clean it up for 15 years," McCaskill said in a Senate speech last week. "And we wonder why we're having trouble with our approval ratings."
McCaskill is one of 23 Democrats and 10 Republicans who will be concerned with approval ratings as they defend their Senate seats in 2012, and she worries that bipartisan initiatives might be tougher in that charged atmosphere -- especially with some moderate Republicans facing conservative challengers. "I'm hopeful that ... doesn't discourage moderates in the Republican Party from working with us to find compromises that can actually solve some problems," she said.
"One of my priorities is just making sure this place doesn't completely disintegrate into political posturing and political bickering and the kind of gamesmanship that has become so prevalent."