Sen. Claire McCaskill claims the Senate passed a budget last year, and calls statements to the contrary a "talking point by the political right," in a video interview with the Quincy Journal, posted Monday.
QUINCY JOURNAL: Just one more, I want to know if the Senate is going to pass a budget.
SEN. CLAIRE MCCASKILL (D., MO.) The Senate passed a budget last August—in fact, we did better. I’ve always complained about the way we did these budget resolutions, because they’re phony baloney. Every year, we pass a resolution and it doesn’t even have force of law. And the appropriators would have just completely ignored it. So last August, for the first time that I’ve been there, we put it into law for two years—the budget for two years, and actually 10 years going forward, but legal spending caps for two years. And guess what happened this year? The appropriators followed it, for the first time since I’ve been there. So them telling—this is Fox News and a talking point by the political right that we haven’t passed a budget. We not only passed one, but for the first time it’s in law, signed by the president and we must follow it. It is bringing down spending and it is bringing down the number of federal employees.
The Democratically controlled Senate has not formally proposed a federal budget resolution in more than three years.
"Sen. McCaskill is either living in fantasyland or deliberately misleading Missouri voters," said National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) spokesman Lance Trover, in a statement. "This is exactly the kind of political double speak the hard working men and women of the Show Me State are tired of and why they are going to show her the door this November."