The Missouri Constitution establishes a definite date each year for adjournment of the Missouri General Assembly.  This was one of those years when adjournment couldn’t happen soon enough.

This miserable session will be remembered as the session that a handful of Republican senators calling themselves the Freedom Caucus ran into the ground because a majority of their party didn’t buy their demands.  They accused the majority of their majority party of being RINOS, a nickname our former president likes to apply to any Republican who does not love him. There is considerable reason to consider far-out clusters such as this as the real Republicans in Name Only.

This will be remembered as the Session of the Filibuster.  The Freedom Caucus kicked off the session with a lengthy discussion of Senate procedure, filibustered for eleven hours trying to force colleagues to act quickly on bills making it harder for citizens to create laws through initiative petition. That led President Pro Team Caleb Rowden to strip four members of the Freedom Caucus of their committee chairmanships and (this seemed to be the most terrible punishment to some of them) took away their parking spaces in the Capitol basement.  Senators Bill Eigel, the ringleader of the caucus, Rick Brattin, Denny Hoskins and Andrew Koenig lost their prestigious positions, after which Eigel stopped action in the Senate for four more hours so he could question several Senators who seemed to support Rowden’s action.

Rowden calculated in late January that the Senate had been in floor session for 17 hours and 52 minutes in 2024. He said the Freedom Caucus had filibustered “things of no consequence whatsoever relative to a piece of policy” for 16 hours and 45 minutes of that time.

And it only got worse. But in the end, the filibuster bit the Freedom Caucus—uh—in the end.

As the session reached May and the crucial last couple of weeks, including the week in which the state budget had to be approved, the caucus stopped things cold for 41 hours—believed to be the longest filibuster in Missouri legislative history—because its priorities were not THE priority of Senate leadership.

But that filibuster record was to be broken in the final week when Democrats and some Republicans fed up with the Freedom Caucus’s behavior got in the way of final approval of the resolution changing the way the state constitution can be changed. Those who had lived by the filibuster died by the filibuster.

The final filibuster lasted FIFTY hours and change. It succeeded where the Freedom Caucus belligerency failed. The Freedom Caucus’ bull-in-a-china shop philosophy of government was repudiated by a Senate that seemed to, in this case at least, rediscovered bipartisanship. But the damage done by this group could not be reversed.

The 2024 legislative session was the least productive in modern memory—or even ancient memory, for that matter.  Only 28 non-budget bills were passed.

That beats the record of 31 in the 2020 session.  But remember, that was the Pandemic Session when the legislature did not meet for several days then operated on a limited basis for several other days.

Eigel disavowed responsibility for that miserable record.  “A lot of bad things that didn’t happen this session didn’t happen because of the people standing behind me,” he said in a post-session Freedom Caucus press conference. His words probably didn’t carry any water with Senators and Representatives who had worked hard and conscientiously on bills that would have done GOOD things only to see them disappear into the ongoing mud fight in the Senate led by Eigel and his band.

Eigel has dreams of becoming Governor.  Denny Hoskins thinks he’d be a peachy Secretary of State. Andrew Koenig thinks being State Treasurer would be wonderful. Rick Brattin just hopes to get elected to another term in the Senate.

There are some folks who have watched them this year who hope they still don’t have parking places in Jefferson City in 2025.

The 50-hour filibuster deserves a closer look. We’ve taken that look to establish the exact length of it so that future observers will know when they have witnessed an even more regrettable example.

Incidentally, it is believed the longest filibuster by one person in Missouri history was Senator Matt Bartle’s futile effort to block some gubernatorial appointments in 2007. He held the floor for seventeen hours.