Session's "Last" Day

The doors of the Senate chamber closed and the President began to call the role ending my last Capitol protest of the session the same way the rest of the daily protests ended. I rolled up the shower curtain du jour, this time the "MARRIAGE EQUALITY IS OVERDUE" shower curtain, the same one I started the session with, slid it into the green canvas satchel with the other banners and trotted down the treacherous Senate stairs.

Nothing remarkable or out of the ordinary happened today. It was actually rather quiet when I started in front of the House at 8:30. The only lobbyist there was Nancy Larson, former running mate of John Marty when he ran for governor back in the early nineties. We had a nice chat. She's very supportive of the cause.

Both the Republicans and DFL caucused this morning so each came to the chamber in a herd. After they were inside I didn't wait for the gavel because both chambers were meeting a 9:00, I just left and went over to the Senate. It was quiet there too and as luck would have it, they were far from ready to start so I was able to catch many of them on their way in.

While there, I bumped into a Planned Parenthood lobbyist and we chatted on the stairs for a while about their legislative interests. A St. Paul Pioneer Press photographer took our picture and jotted down our names. It'll be interesting to see if that's in the paper tomorrow. There was a small group of veterans huddled around the top of the stairs on a mission I could not discern, but they had their picture taken on the stairs and were nabbing some senators on their way in.

There is a lot of legislation still unpassed and unsigned so even though everyone speaks optimistically about this being the last day, we won't really know until tomorrow.

I have some experiences from the past few days I'll write about in subsequent posts.