‘This place was ugly.’ Session’s bitter infighting doomed Missouri GOP’s policy goals

Shortly after midnight Thursday in the final hours of the legislative session, months of simmering tensions and derailed debates boiled over on the floor of the Missouri Senate.

Sen. Bob Onder, a hard-line Republican from Lake St. Louis, was trying to add language banning abortion providers from receiving Medicaid money to an unrelated health care bill, a controversial change that would have likely killed the bill.

One by one, several Republicans aligned with Senate leadership excoriated Onder and his seven-member Conservative Caucus, who had for the better part of the session ground the upper chamber to a halt through filibusters and personal animosity.

“Most of the people in this room are fed up. Everybody in here knows who we’re fed up with,” Sen. Elaine Gannon, a De Soto Republican, said to the group, specifically Onder. “And you know what, you’re outnumbered.”

Sen. Bill White, a Joplin Republican, chimed in, accusing the group of “intimidation” and “bullying.”

In an interview with reporters Thursday, Onder doubled down on his criticism of Republican Senate leadership.

“There’s been a lot of mistrust, a lot of dirty tricks in the course of this session, and last session too,” he said.

The bitter infighting among Senate Republicans on the floor Thursday encapsulated a legislative session that had completely gone off the rails. The waning hours of the session illustrated the divide among senators in the Republican party.

Later in the day, the Missouri legislature would finally reach an agreement on a congressional map — officially becoming one of the last states in the nation to meet its constitutional obligation.

The Senate would then adjourn early, leaving behind a fractured GOP that had failed to accomplish many of its Republican legislative priorities. For most of the session, the chamber was marred in chaotic fights and personal attacks.

Republicans in both chambers proposed a flurry of bills this year with conservative voters in mind. Among the goals were making it harder to change the state’s constitution, bans on transgender student athletes, a push to increase parents’ abilities to oversee their children’s education and various other conservative-led proposals.

In the end, nearly all of those measures failed.

The Missouri General Assembly, excluding the state budget and non-binding resolutions, passed only 44 policy measures this year, according to House Democrats. This total was just 13 more than 2020 when COVID-19 shut the government down for six weeks and resulted in the lowest number of bills passed since at least 1994.

“It’s no secret that this place was ugly at times, was difficult to watch,” Senate Majority Leader Caleb Rowden, a Columbia Republican, told reporters after the chamber adjourned Thursday. “Sometimes, there were days where I frankly went home embarrassed.”

The Conservative Caucus upended the Senate’s agenda

For most of the session, the Senate was led not by Rowden but by the group of senators called the Conservative Caucus. The faction, largely spearheaded by Onder, made it their win-at-all-costs mission to strictly enforce conservative legislation. They crafted bills around hard-line buzzwords like the often-mentioned, but rarely defined “Critical Race Theory” and “defunding” abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.

“We’re always on the tip of the spear on every one of those issues,” Onder told reporters Thursday. “To the very end, we were pushing for an education bill that would ban critical race theory and would protect women’s sports.”

But most of the group’s focus this year was on redistricting — the once-a-decade process of redrawing the state’s congressional boundaries. The Conservative Caucus wanted to block the congressional map endorsed by GOP leaders, which maintained the state’s current mix of six Republicans and two Democrats in Congress.

When other Republicans stood in the way of their bills or attempts to redraw the map, the hard-liners chewed up floor time reading from various documents, books from conservative authors or reciting the lyrics of songs covering numerous genres, from Garth Brooks to Twisted Sister to Carly Rae Jepsen. Their tactics drew swift pushback from establishment Republicans who argued the group was killing meaningful legislation for political gain.

The motivations behind the Conservative Caucus’ tactics were at times hard to identify. Three members — Republican Sen. Mike Moon of Ash Grove, Sen. Eric Burlison of Battlefield and Sen. Rick Brattin of Harrisonville — are running for open seats in Congress. Onder is also considered a possible future congressional candidate and is running for St. Charles County executive.

But its members say their goal was to weed out legislation that did not promote strict conservative ideals — and to call out those who disagree.

“I think that part of the reason you’re seeing a lot of these fractures in the caucus right now is because we continually see too many members of the Republican caucus deviating from [the GOP] platform,” said Conservative Caucus member Sen. Bill Eigel, a Weldon Spring Republican.

The group’s disagreements with GOP leadership, which came to a head in the early morning hours Thursday, have caused some legislators to argue that there are three distinct factions within the Missouri Senate: Democrats, Republicans aligned with Senate leadership and the hard-right members of the Conservative Caucus.

Despite these factions, the two GOP-controlled chambers were able to pass some Republican-led legislation this year, including a controversial elections bill that requires photo IDs to vote, a bill that will send millions more in funding to charter schools in Kansas City and St. Louis and two measures that would require Kansas City to spend more money on law enforcement.

And amid pushback from Conservative Caucus members, both chambers sent to Gov. Mike Parson’s desk a record-setting $49 billion budget, infused with about $3 billion in federal dollars.

GOP infighting led to policy wins for Democrats

The story of this year’s session was less about what the Missouri legislature accomplished and more about what it didn’t. Conservative Caucus members failed to tack transgender-related legislation onto various bills. A so-called “Parents’ Bill of Rights” allowing parents to sue school districts never made it to the Senate floor after passing the House. And a Republican attempt to make it harder for voters to amend the state’s constitution was killed amid fierce opposition from Democrats.

In an interview with reporters Thursday, Onder and Eigel acknowledged the failure of many hard-line Republican policies this year.

“I said a couple of weeks ago that I thought that the Democrats were having a pretty good session. And I think that, unfortunately, was the case,” Onder said.

Eigel later rebuffed a question over whether his faction’s filibuster tactics were related to personal vendettas instead of legitimate policies.

“There is a tendency to think that a lot of what is going on is personal, but this is about policy,” he said.

Throughout the session, Senate Democrats were largely able to use the internal fissures in the GOP to their advantage. The group at times sat and watched as Republicans duked it out. They also aligned with one side over the other on bills they were in favor of or wanted to kill.

House Democrats on Friday criticized GOP lawmakers for failing to legislate. But they also celebrated the fact that GOP infighting left many controversial bills unfinished.

“After two decades in power, these guys still have no clue how to govern,” said House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat. “On one hand, the majority party’s inability to run the legislative branch is an absolute embarrassment. But since their policy agenda consists largely of dismantling democracy, banning ideas that frighten them and bullying vulnerable children, Republicans’ failure to function actually was huge victory for the people of Missouri.”

Although the Senate was finally able to pass the congressional map, the personal attacks will likely continue into the August primaries, where 17 Senate seats are up for election.

Rowden, whose term ends in 2024, on Thursday vowed to fix relationships within the upper chamber.

“If this place is going to work in the future, we’re gonna have to figure out a way to build some bridges,” he said.