McCaskill offers plan to limit executive pay

Go, Claire, go.

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill today got national attention for ripping into Wall Street executives and their excessive bonuses.

Sen. Claire McCaskill has delivered a sharp threat to the wallets of corporate executives who took large compensation packages even as their companies accepted government bailout funds. Things, she warned, are going to change.

"I've been mad for a while," said the Missouri Democrat. "When we passed the initial half of the TARP money, [there were] rumors about bonuses, the fact that too many of these guys were holding onto the jobs even though they were running these companies into the ground. Reality didn't seem to be the order of the day."

So McCaskill took to the Senate floor on Friday to put an end to the surrealism. In a bill that came to the surprise of reporters, her colleagues, and the White House alike -- there was no coordination with the Obama administration, she said -- the Missouri Democrat called for compensation for employees of bailout recipients to be capped at $400,000 a year.

"They don't get it," McCaskill said on the floor. "These people are idiots. You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18-billion in bonuses... What planet are these people on?"

Then she backed up her tough talk with a proposed law.

She wants to limit compensation given out by any companies that accept U.S. bailout funds.

Great idea, Claire. Now good luck getting it into law, after the furor has died down, and the GOP revs up the "you-can't-tell-private-businesses-what-do-do" machine.

Of course, McCaskill would have a better chance of passing this law if Obama maintains his strong stance -- taken Thursday -- in opposition to the bonuses handed out last year.

Working together, McCaskill and Obama may have a chance to make a difference on this issue.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, however, McCaskill didn't just take on corporate CEOs. She criticized some of the spending in the House stimulus package, saying that her fellow Democrats had been "over-anxious."

"Whether it is the National Endowment of the Arts or some of the STD funding or contraceptive funding, all we did was just tee up ammunition for the other side to tear this thing down," she said. "And I would like to think we are smarter than that. I'm hopeful on the Senate side we will be smarter than that."

McCaskill chalked up the mistakes to Democrats only just getting comfortable to life without a Republican president. "There has been such a starvation diet for some of these programs that the appropriators got a little over-anxious in the House. They probably did some things they shouldn't have."

McCaskill also made news predicting that "a few" Republican senators would support the Employee Free Choice Act, a labor community priority that has engendered heated debate between the two political parties. And she called on leadership in her party to vote on the legislation -- which would allow unions to organize more easily -- "sooner rather than later."