(MISSOURINET CAPITOL STUDIO. Noonish, Tuesday, May 8, 2012) — This is the time of year, every year, when those of us who watch the Missouri General Assembly realize the inmates have taken over the asylum. Their supervisors have lost control. A character named Amok is running throughout the third floor, where the legislative chambers are located.

Amok, by the way, is a product of Malaysian culture, an individual who has been brooding about things for some time suddenly launching a mass assault against people or objects. Although Running Amok (we didn’t know that was his first name until we did some dictionary work a few minutes ago) was thought to be most prevalent in Malaysia although psychologists worldwide say it is part of every culture.

This is the time of year when the clock seems to grow in size and it becomes a countdown to THE END. Every two years it is more than the end of a legislative session. It is for many members of the House and the Senate the end of a legislative career. For some, it becomes a last chance to make a mark, to create a legacy, or to achieve something an obituary writer might want to mention, one hopes, many years from now. For some with dreams of greater glory, it is a time to add a credential, knowing that opponents are watching in these last crucial days for any mote or any misstep that becomes campaign ammunition.

Today, we’re back in the capitol on two and a half hours of sleep. The senate quit at 3:40 this morning, deadlocked by Senator Jason Crowell who is in a stare-down with Speaker of the House Steven Tilley about $2.3 milion out of a $24 Billion state budget. The House didn’t go quite so late, but House correspondent Mike Lear also is running on a tank where the low-fuel light is glowing.

But then, so are members of the legislature.

Fatigue. Pressure. Unresolved major issues. Unresolved personal agendas. The looming end of a unique life experience for many. They’re all factors in these lasts days. If you like to watch people, the capitol in these last two weeks is crawling with case studies.

The House and Senate met for only a few minutes this morning. Senator Crowell has bludgeoned the senate to a standstill by promising to keep any bill brought up for debate from getting to a vote until he gets Speaker Tilley’s money for Southeast Missouri State thrown out of the budget. Both are Republicans. But at this time of year, and in Missouri’s present political climate, cohesiveness is not one of the finer qualities of the Republican Party. Democrats are small in numbers but waiting to find ways to take advantage of the majority’s situation or to just sit back and watch Republicans scrap among themselves.

This is the time for a lot of negotiations, a lot of bargaining, a lot of arguing, a lot of threatening, some rhetorical fist-shaking, and sometimes some regrettable words — Crowell apologized early this morning on the senate floor to any fellow senators he might have upset with remarks that charged senate leaders with backstabbing and lying — although not in those specific words.

It’s that time of year. Amok has entered the building and is running in the halls. Most of the time a sort of order eventually is restored although on days like these it is hard to realize that it will be.

The political science textbooks and the college public policy courses don’t describe this all-too-human part of the process.

Usually at times like this somebody blinks. Somebody caves in. Somebody figures out a way to accommodate both angry sides so things can move ahead. Usually. But this year? Well, it just seems as if half of the cards in the deck are wild.

If the legislature doesn’t pass a budget by 6 p.m. Friday, the governor can call it back for a special budget session. In a campaign year, it would not be a good thing for incumbents to face opponents who charge their inability to find middle ground on state spending has forced the state to spend another $25,000 a day on a special session at a time when the state is so short of money that pensions for the blind might be eliminated and schools again go under-funded.

How lucky capitol reporters are to have front row seats for all of this.

We have to keep telling ourselves that on days when the Senate adjourns at 3:40 a.m. and we get home with the sun well above the horizon.

(CAPITOL STUDIO, 8:30 p.m., Thursday, May 3, 2012) — We’d be at home by this time on most Thursdays during the legislative session. Lawmakers usually wrap up their work weeks about mid-day Thursday. But tonight, a small group of senators is blocking a vote on a prescription drug monitoring bill that they says violates personal freedoms. As with most filibusters, this one is mostly an exercise in gnawing time off the clock with occasional instances of passion and rare flashes of verbiage that comes within six degrees of profundity.

We have been told that as we write this, negotiations on a new version of the bill are underway in hopes of satisfying Senator Rob Schaaf of St. Joseph, who started this exercise shortly after one o’clock this afternoon. He has his allies who have volunteered to take two-hour shifts during the filibuster. They’re all Republicans except for Maria Chappelle-Nadal, who had to leave after a short stint this afternoon to go home to University City where she is a school board member. But she promised to come back and take the 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. shift.

While he was on the floor, Schaaf was soliciting emails and faxes from people listening to him on the internet. It almost sounded as if he was auditioning for a job as master of ceremonies during his local NPR station’s pledge week. He got a lot of responses. We’ll have more at the end of this entry about how he got the means to do that.

This has been the filibusteringest legislative session those of us at the press table, the secretary’s dais, and the clerk’s office can recall.

“Our job as a senator is to slow down that train that is rolling down the track that wants to run over the liberties of the people we’re elected to serve in this body,” Senator Jim Lembke is saying as we write this. Lembke says, “A government that moves quickly is a very dangerous, dangerous thing.” He says a government that is slow in its actions better serves its people.

And that’s why the Senate exists. It has been described as the saucer to which the coffee is poured to cool (a depiction often traced to a conversation between Thomas Jefferson and George Washington).

Filibusters are excruciating things to endure — we’ve made that observation before. But they are important, so important that the Senate is extremely reluctant to move the previous question, a motion that cuts off debate and moves to a vote.

We have on our bulletin board in the studio a list of times the Senate has used the PQ to shut down debate. It’s been almost five years since it was last used. Interestingly, the last senator to use it is the sponsor of the prescription monitoring bill being filibustered right now, Senator Kevin Engler of Farmington. He used it four times to get passage of a proposed constitutional amendment designating English the language of all official proceedings of the state. It was used eight other times in that session.

The motion is used all the time in the House these days although we remember a time when it wasn’t used very often there either. But the House limits the amount of time anybody can speak on a bill and then is not bashful about shutting off debate and passing bills. That’s the freight train that Lembke is talking about. Although he has not specifically said the majority in the House runs that train, others have said so.

So bills reach the senate where they sometimes have to run the filibuster gauntlet, where senators like Rob Schaaf and Jim Lembke and, earlier this session, Maria Chappelle-Nadal can talk and talk and talk, hoping the passage of time forces closer examination of legislation and produces changes that head off unintended consequences, corrects mistakes, and moderates extreme positions. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Years ago, the Missourinet went to then President pro Tem Jim Mathewson and we said, “If you install a decent public address system in the senate, we’ll put your debates on the internet through the Missourinet web page.”

He did. So we did. The Senate now does its own streaming. But that’s why we’ve been able to write what Senator Lembke has said as he has said it (we thank him for speaking slowly enough for us to keep up with him). And it’s why Senator Schaaf was able to solicit all those emails and faxes that provided talking material — the internet broadcasts that have opened the senate to all of the people of Missouri.

And for the last couple of hours we’ve done what a lot of other people have been doing — listening on the internet to the Senate being the Senate.

They’re wonderful things, the internet and filibusters — in their own ways.

UPDATE: A short time after we went back upstairs to the senate press table, bill sponsor Kevin Engler brought in a compromise that included the statewide vote that Schaaf wanted although he didn’t like the language of the ballot title. The Senate had been debating a bill that already had passed the House. But by the time Engler brought in a new proposal there were not enough Senators left in the building to pass the bill that Shaaf had been blocking. Only 16 of the 34 senators were in the chamber at 9:35 p.m. when a voice vote perfected a rewritten senate bill — in other words, approved changes in the original proposal and put the bill into position for final passage.

But it might have been a sort of pyrrhic victory. The issue is likely dead for another year. Although Engler was holding out hope after the vote that the senate would send the bill to the House next week when all 34 senators are back, floor leader Tom Dempsey told us there won’t be a final passage vote. Schaaf has accomplished his goal — killing the bill.

Engler says killing the bill means more prescription drug criminals will kill more Missourians.

Filibusters are best when they’re over. Only when the curtain comes down can the audience appreciate the clash of ideas and the collision of wills that has been played out before them. Both sides can win. Both sides can lose.

And, at last, both sides can go home for the weekend.

Remember a few years ago when the dreaded Humane Society of the United States used a hidden camera to show the public images of cattle that could not walk being slaughtered in the state of California? The furor that caused led to the biggest beef recall in American history.

The Missouri House of Representatives has sent the state senate a proposed law that would make anybody who records such things a criminal if they do it without the cattle processor knowing they’re doing it, and getting permission to record those images.

The HSUS seems to be The Great Satan as far as Missouri agriculture is concerned. And Representative Casey Guernsey doesn’t want it showing any similar images of Missouri processing plants — if there are any to be shown. He says the public doesn’t understand agriculture practices. So his bill would charge a person with a new kind of fraud if they go to work for a processor and then shoot video of what is going on inside the building and then lets people see what he saw.

Do it more than once, and the undercover camera person could be a prison inmate. Furthermore, that person would be liable for restitution for any damages caused  resulting from what now would become a crime.

We checked with an expert at the other end of the room about this sort of thing because as a reporter we innately dislike any legislation that impedes public knowledge about something as important as the food we eat. Cyndi Young is the director of the Brownfield Network, the nation’s largest radio farm network. She and her husband also raise cattle. She told me that “down” cattle — the kind that were shown in the California videos being dragged to their slaughter or taken by forklift to their slaughter — can be unable to walk to their doom for several reasons. Perhaps they’re dehydrated. Perhaps they broke a leg while being hauled in one of those big trailers to the slaughterhouse.

She also told me that federally-inspected plants (the only ones she and her husband send their cattle to) have federal inspectors who check the animals for diseases and who check the meat that comes from them.

The slaughter of the animals that become our food is not something most of us would like to see week after week on a TV (un)reality show. So images that might be secretly made inside a slaughter house are likely to be pretty revolting to folks who think their hamburger and their chicken breasts arrive in their supermarket cooler though some non-violent and mysterious way. Missouri’s defenders of agriculture are critical of the HSUS for seeking that public reaction. The animal agriculture industry has often voiced the opinion at the capitol that HSUS wants to eliminate animal agriculture and using hidden-camera images to turn the public’s stomachs and to turn public opinion is a way to do that.

HSUS denies those assertions.

Animal agriculture apparently through HB1860 seems to think that the only way to counter the perceived information abuse by HSUS is to make criminals of anyone who gains access to a production facility under false pretenses and then circulates recordings of what they see.

No industry likes to be cast in an unfavorable light. But the reporter who sees such a bill  might be excused for being uncomfortable about an industry as important at the one that processes our food that wants to make it a crime for someone to show the public something other than the company line.

There aren’t many journalists in the Missouri House, where 108 of the 163 members voted last week to send the bill to the Senate.