Senator McCaskill starts a series of town hall meetings on health care this week. She hopes to have several more throughout Missouri during the August Congressional break. But she hopes something does NOT happen at those meetings. .
Several members of Congress who’ve tried to hold town hall meetings on health care have found the meetings disrupted by disorderly crowds. Things were so raucous at last week’s St. Louis County meeting by Congressman Russ Carnahan that six people were arrested. McCaskill says one of her own staff members was called "a fat pig" in a meeting she set up just for opponents of the Obama health care plan. She hopes crowds at her town hall meetings show more courtesy than that.
"These town hall meetings are for everyone…People who show up in Missouri and think it’s a good idea to shout down people and to jeer people and to name-call and, basically, to have the kind of behavior that I would have really gotten in trouble for when I was a child—I was taught that good manners are pretty important," she says.
McCaskill says people are entitled to be angry and to speak out against her, but she says they need to express themselves in a way that respects other people in the room so everyone can be heard. If they can do that, she says, she has no problems.
Maybe, she suggests, she can take some of her "really good" cookies to make everybody on their best behaviors.
Upload McCaskill’s teleconference comments (3:08 mp3)
