From Missouri Digital News: https://mdn.org

®RM75¯®FC¯®MDBO¯COL167 - A Session Marked by an Intern Scandal and Filibusters®MDNM¯ ®FL¯ By Phill Brooks There are some fascinating historical perspectives to the two factors that helped define the 2015 legislative session -- the intern scandal that drove a House speaker out of office and filibusters that blocked Senate work in the final week. The story of text-messaging impropriety by House Speaker John Diehl with a college intern reminded me of earlier years when the Missouri legislature had major problems with the behavior by some legislators and female college students working in the legislature. I was reminded the other day by a long-time statehouse observer of a legislator who openly dated a female college student working as a legislative intern who later became his wife. The problem was so widespread that the House adopted much stronger sexual harassment policies. The Kansas City Star -- the same newspaper that broke the Diehl story -- reports that an advance copy of a book of Sen. Claire McCaskill's memoirs recounts statehouse encounters that made her uncomfortable. "One day I ended up in the elevator with two older male legislators and one of their assistants. They began asking if I liked 'to party' and then tried to get me to come to one of their offices for some drinks. I felt trapped. For the rest of the internship, I took the stairs," McCaskill is quoted by Steve Paul as having written. I was acutely aware of the problem because some of my female journalism students often came to me to ask how to handle inappropriate and unwanted advances by male legislators. And like McCaskill, those advances sometimes occurred in Capitol elevators. With more women legislators and the cultural advances of the succeeding decades, I thought things had changed. Complaints from my own students are far, far less frequent. But in the aftermath of the Diehl story, one female legislator told me that for women in the statehouse, there still is a problem. And the new House speaker, Todd Richardson, said members already have talked with him about stronger policies for student interns. "I want to make sure this state Capitol is an environment where young people can come and get the experience in public service that I think they really deserve as part of their college career," Richardson said. As for filibusters, that too has a history harking back to an era that I thought had passed. While the Democratic filibuster of the last week of the session was sparked by Republicans forcing a vote on the Right to Work bill prohibiting union membership requirements, Democrats had been obstructing the Senate pace the week before with long talks, if not filibusters. It was the same tactic taken by Senate Democrats after Republicans gained control of the legislature in 2001. Form Senate Democratic Leader Ken Jacob was candid with me that the purpose of the painfully long, boring and often irrelevant Democratic debate simply was to reduce the number of Republican bills that could get passed. But that era ended in 2008 when a group of three Republicans cut a deal with the Democrats. The three Republicans agreed that they would not support a motion to shut off a filibuster if Democrats would limit filibusters to issues that were core issues for them. Without those three, Republicans lacked the votes needed to approve a motion to stop a filibuster. As part of that agreement, there were more efforts to reach before filibusters were launched. And, filibusters were limited to times that they were the only way to stop legislation. There's an interesting historical footnote to this year's Right to Work filibuster. One of the few Republicans to vote against stopping the Democratic filibuster was the only Republican of the group who made that 2008 filibuster agreement He now is Senate's president pro tem -- Tom Dempsey, R-St. Charles. Dempsey also voted against the Right to Work bill, so maybe his vote against ending the filibuster had little to do with his prior agreement. But for me, it was an echo of a not too distant era of a more civil and effective Missouri Senate. 

[Phill Brooks has been a Missouri statehouse reporter since 1970, making him dean of the statehouse press corps. He is the statehouse correspondent for KMOX Radio, director of MDN and an emeritus faculty member of the Missouri School of Journalism. He has covered every governor since the late Warren Hearnes.]

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