Missouri Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden, R-Columbia, has had enough. He has stripped the committee assignments and chairmanships of some Missouri Freedom Caucus members – Senators Denny Hoskins, Andrew Koenig, Rick Brattin, and Bill Eigel.
Rowden said the chamber, designed to be occupied with civil, principled statesmen and women, has been “overtaken by a small group of swamp creatures who, all too often, remind me more of my children than my colleagues.”
The caucus members have been blamed for blocking Senate chamber business since session began. Rowden said the beginning of the 2024 legislative session has been nothing short of an embarrassment.
“They have demanded progress, civility, and the passage of policies that would provide better schools, a stronger economy, and safer communities around this state,” Rowden said. “Instead, the chaos caucus has chosen to use the Missouri Senate as a place to try and salvage their languishing statewide campaigns and intentionally destroy the institution in an effort to claim that the game is rigged against them.”
Being stripped of committee assignments prevents the lawmakers from advancing or blocking key legislation at the committee level.
Eigel said that the moderate Republican majority “failed to get any meaningful legislation to the voters last year.”
“Their mantra that we should continue to trust in the process that has failed Missouri year after year after year is the most political, cynical, and quite frankly disappointing answer we could have hoped for,” he said.
A frustrated Hoskins calls out Rowden for “using the same playbook Joe Biden is using against Donald Trump.”
“Everybody knows that we’re running for the same statewide office. Is that correct? I would assume most people do. Yeah! So, you’re being punitive and I’m sure you saw the polls that came out this past weekend too,” Hoskins said. “I’d be mad as well if I spent four or six years up there doing press conferences and I was losing to another senator in a statewide race.”
Senate Democratic Leader John Rizzo called out his Republican colleagues for partisan pandering and “stumbling down the dead-end-road of personal attacks.” He said that Republican in-fighting masks their “failures”, and that they are failing to address the issues Missourians care about.
Copyright 2024, Missourinet.
