With only three days to go before the end this year's General Assembly, state senators on Wednesday took no votes on any bills.
Instead, Missouri Senate Democrats spent the better part of six hours talking with each other - mostly about their anger and frustration over the majority of Republicans forcing passage of the controversial right-to-work proposal Tuesday, by halting debate through a "previous question" (PQ) motion.
Although part of the Senate's rules, several Democrats noted, the tactic rarely is used.
Senate rules also require each day begin with the reading and approval of the previous day's journal - a process usually streamlined by the unanimous approval of a motion to approve the journal without its being read from start to finish.
Wednesday, the Democrats refused to consent, and the reading of the journal took a half-hour.
Then the Democrats' talk-fest began after Sen. Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, asked the chamber to act on the bill extending the federal reimbursement allowance, or FRA, for a year.
It allows hospitals and some other Medicaid providers to add an assessment on their services, as a way to draw extra federal money.
"This is $3.617 billion that, if we don't renew this, would be absent from the Medicaid program," Schaefer said as he introduced the bill for a vote.
But the Senate ended its day without taking a vote on Schaefer's motion.
"We stand ready to pass it," Schaefer told the News Tribune after the Senate adjourned. "I don't know why the Democrats aren't going to let it pass."
A little more than two hours into the slow-down, Majority Leader Ron Richard, R-Joplin, issued a news release voicing his frustration with the Democrats' lack of action.
"Instead of joining us in passing this bill used to reimburse hospitals and nursing homes for medical care they provide to struggling families," Richard said, "the minority is threatening to kill it on an unrelated matter."
But that "matter" wasn't unrelated, the Democrats argued, saying the Republicans brought the trouble on themselves by forcing the vote on right-to-work which was sent to the governor on a House vote Wednesday.
"We have been bulldozed," Sen. Scott Sifton, D-Affton, told Minority Leader Joe Keaveny, D-St. Louis. "We have been run over. We have been mauled.
"And all I can say is, we are not going to allow that to continue to happen."
While both wanted Schaefer's bill to pass, they charged the GOP decision to push right-to-work instead of the FRA bill meant Republicans put a higher priority on changing labor laws.
"We are done!" an emotional Sifton told Keaveny.
Schaefer later told the News Tribune: "I think that's absurd. We, obviously, have a lot of bills we have to get to, and the order of the bills depends on a whole lot of things."
Richard told the newspaper: "(The PQ motion) was something we had to do to break a filibuster.
"That's a vote that we've been working for, for almost 50 years, on right-to-work."
The Senate leadership was ready to vote on the FRA bill last Friday and this past Monday, Richard said, but the filibuster and the slow-down process prevented it.
"What the public needs to understand is, the Senate works extremely well when we treat each other with respect, and when we have open and fair discussions and debates," Keaveny said in a Wednesday evening interview. "That's how good public policy gets enacted."
But, he said, the Republicans' using the PQ motion didn't "preserve the integrity of the Senate."
"This is the time of the session when bad things get slipped into bills," Keaveny added. "These bills still need to be vetted."
People shouldn't compare the two sides to children fighting in a schoolyard, he said.
"I think that's a very simple reaction," Keaveny said. "Ninety-five percent of the bills that we pass out of here are bipartisan."