Missouri State Senate
Missouri General Assembly
Type
Type	Upper house
Term limits	2 terms (8 years)
New session started	January 5, 2011
Leadership
President of the Senate	Peter Kinder, (R) since January 10, 2005
President pro Tempore	Rob Mayer, (R) since January 5, 2011
Majority Leader	Tom Dempsey, (R) since January 5, 2011
Minority Leader	Victor Callahan, (D) since December 1, 2008
Structure
Members	34
Political groups	Republican Party (26) Democratic Party (7)
Length of term	4 years
Authority	Article IV, Missouri Constitution
Salary	$35,915/year + per diem
Elections
Last election	November 2, 2010 (17 seats)
Next election	November 6, 2012 (17 seats)
Redistricting	Legislative Control
Meeting place
State Senate Chamber Missouri State Capitol Jefferson City, Missouri
Website
Missouri State Senate

The Missouri State Senate is the upper chamber of the Missouri General Assembly. It has 34 members, representing districts with an average population of 160,000. Its members serve four-year terms, with half the seats being up for election every two years.

Composition[link]

After the 2010 elections, the party representation in the Senate was:

Senate Officers[link]

Members of the Missouri Senate[link]

Committees[link]

Standing Committees[link]

Select Committees[link]

See also[link]

• Missouri House of Representatives
• List of current Missouri State Senators

References[link]

External links[link]

• Missouri State Senate
• State Senate of Missouri at Project Vote Smart
• Missouri Senate at Ballotpedia

v t e Members of the Missouri State Senate 96th General Assembly (2011–2012) President of the Senate: Peter Kinder (R) President pro Tempore: Rob Mayer (R) Majority Leader: Tom Dempsey (R) Minority Leader: Victor Callahan (D)        Jim Lembke (R)    Scott Rupp (R)    Kevin Engler (R)    Joseph Keaveny (D)    Robin Wright-Jones (D)    Mike Kehoe (R)    Jane Cunningham (R)    Will Kraus (R)    Kiki Curls (D)    Jolie Justus (D)    Victor Callahan (D)    Brad Lager (R)    Timothy Green (D)    Maria Chappelle-Nadal (D)    Eric Schmitt (R)    Dan W. Brown (R)    Luann Ridgeway (R)    Brian Munzlinger (R)    Kurt Schaefer (R)    Jay Wasson (R)    Bill Stouffer (R)    Ryan McKenna (D)    Tom Dempsey (R)    John Lamping (R)    Robert Mayer (R)    Brian Nieves (R)    Jason Glennon Crowell (R)    Mike Parson (R)    Jack Goodman (R)    Bob Dixon (R)    David Pearce (R)    Ron Richard (R)    Chuck Purgason (R)    Robert Schaaf (R)    Republican (26)    Democratic (8) Missouri General Assembly Missouri House of Representatives Missouri State Senate

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State of Missouri
Flag Seal
Nickname(s): The Show-Me State (official)
Motto(s): Salus populi suprema lex esto (Latin)
Official language(s)	None
Demonym	Missourian
Capital	Jefferson City
Largest city	Kansas City
Largest metro area	Greater St Louis Area[1]
Area	Ranked 21st in the U.S.
- Total	69,704 sq mi (180,533 km2)
- Width	240 miles (385 km)
- Length	300 miles (480 km)
- % water	1.17
- Latitude	36° N to 40° 37′ N
- Longitude	89° 6′ W to 95° 46′ W
Population	Ranked 18th in the U.S.
- Total	6,010,688 (2011 est)[2]
- Density	87.3/sq mi  (33.7/km2) Ranked 28th in the U.S.
- Median household income	$46,867 (35th)
Elevation
- Highest point	Taum Sauk Mountain[3][4] 1,772 ft (540 m)
- Mean	800 ft  (240 m)
- Lowest point	Saint Francis River at southern Arkansas border[3][4] 230 ft (70 m)
Before statehood	Missouri Territory
Admission to Union	August 10, 1821 (24th)
Governor	Jay Nixon (D)
Lieutenant Governor	Peter Kinder (R)
Legislature	General Assembly
- Upper house	Senate
- Lower house	House of Representatives
U.S. Senators	Claire McCaskill (D) Roy Blunt (R)
U.S. House delegation	6 Republicans, 3 Democrats (list)
Time zone	Central: UTC-6/-5
Abbreviations	MO US-MO
Website	www.mo.gov

Missouri State symbols
Animate insignia
Amphibian	American Bullfrog
Bird(s)	Bluebird
Fish	Channel Catfish
Flower(s)	White hawthorn
Grass	Big bluestem
Insect	Honey bee
Mammal(s)	Missouri Mule
Tree	Flowering Dogwood
Inanimate insignia
Dance	Square Dance
Dinosaur	Hypsibema missouriensis[5]
Fossil	Crinoid
Gemstone	Aquamarine
Mineral	Galena
Rock	Mozarkite
Slogan(s)	Show Me (unofficial)
Song(s)	"Missouri Waltz"
Route marker(s)
State Quarter
Released in 2003
Lists of United States state insignia

Missouri (ⁱ/mɨˈzʊəri/)^[6] (nickname The Show Me State) is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States,^[7] bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. Missouri is the 21st most extensive and the 18th most populous of the 50 United States. Missouri comprises 114 counties and the independent city of St. Louis. The four largest urban areas are St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, and Columbia.^[8] Missouri's capital is Jefferson City. The land that is now Missouri was acquired from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase and became known as the Missouri Territory. Part of the Territory was admitted into the union as the 24th state on August 10, 1821.

Missouri generally mirrors the demographic, economic and political makeup of America and has long been considered a political bellwether state.^[9] With the exceptions of the Presidential elections of 1956 and 2008, Missouri's results have accurately predicted the next President of the United States in every election since 1904. It has both Midwestern and Southern cultural influences, reflecting its history as a border state. It is also a transition between the Eastern and Western United States, as St. Louis is often called the "western-most Eastern city" and Kansas City the "eastern-most Western city". Missouri's geography is highly varied. The northern part of the state lies in dissected till plains while the southern part lies in the Ozark Mountains (a dissected plateau), with the Missouri River dividing the two. The state lies at the intersection of the three greatest rivers of North America, with the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers near St. Louis,^[10] and the confluence of the Ohio River with the Mississippi north of the Bootheel. The starting points of the Pony Express Trail and Oregon Trail were both in Missouri.^[11] The mean center of United States population as of the 2010 Census is at the town of Plato in Texas County, Missouri.^[12]

Etymology[link]

The state is named for the Missouri River, which was named after the Siouan-language tribe. They were called the ouemessourita (wimihsoorita^[13]), meaning "those who have dugout canoes", by the Miami-Illinois language speakers. The Illini were the first natives encountered by Europeans in the region and they adopted the name of the Missouri from them.^[14]

Geography[link]

Missouri, showing major cities and roads

Missouri borders eight different states, as does its neighbor, Tennessee. No state in the U.S. touches more than eight states. Missouri is bounded on the north by Iowa; on the east, across the Mississippi River, by Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee; on the south by Arkansas; and on the west by Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska (the last across the Missouri River). The two largest Missouri rivers are the Mississippi, which defines the eastern boundary of the state, and the Missouri River, which flows from west to east through the state, essentially connecting the two largest metros, Kansas City and St. Louis.

Although today the state is usually considered part of the Midwest,^[15][16] historically Missouri was considered by many to be a Southern state,^[17] chiefly because of the settlement of migrants from the South and its status as a slave state before the Civil War. The counties that made up "Little Dixie" were those along the Missouri River in the center of the state, settled by Southern migrants who held the greatest concentration of slaves.

In 2005, Missouri received 16,695,000 visitors to its national parks and other recreational areas totaling 202,000 acres (820 km²), giving it $7.41 million in annual revenues, 26.6% of its operating expenditures.^[18]

Topography[link]

A physiographic map of Missouri

North of, and in some cases just south of, the Missouri River lie the Northern Plains that stretch into Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Here, gentle rolling hills remain from the glaciation that once extended from the Canadian Shield to the Missouri River. Missouri has many large river bluffs along the Mississippi, Missouri, and Meramec Rivers. Southern Missouri rises to the Ozark Mountains, a dissected plateau surrounding the Precambrian igneous St. Francois Mountains. This region also hosts karst topography characterized by high limestone content with the formation of sinkholes and caves.^[19]

A portion of the Ozarks in Southern Missouri

The southeastern part of the state is the Bootheel region, part of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain or Mississippi embayment. This region is the lowest, flattest, and wettest part of the state. It is also among the poorest, as the economy is mostly agricultural.^[20] It is also the most fertile, with cotton and rice crops predominant. The Bootheel was the epicenter of the four New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811–1812.

Climate[link]

Missouri generally has a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification Dfa) with cold winters and hot and humid summers. In the southern part of the state, particularly in the Bootheel, the climate turns into a humid subtropical climate (Koppen Cfa). Located in the interior United States, Missouri often experiences extremes in temperatures. Without high mountains or oceans nearby to moderate temperature, its climate is alternately influenced by air from the cold Arctic and the hot and humid Gulf of Mexico. Missouri's highest recorded temperature is 118 °F (48 °C) at Warsaw and Union on July 14, 1954 while the lowest recorded temperature is −40 °F (−40 °C) also at Warsaw on February 13, 1905.

Missouri also receives extreme weather in the form of thunderstorms and tornadoes. The most recent EF5 tornado in the state to cause damage and casualties was the 2011 Joplin tornado, which destroyed roughly 1/3 of the city of Joplin. The tornado caused an estimated $1–3 billion dollars in damages, killed 159 (+1 non-tornadic), and injured over 1,000 people. The tornado was the first EF5 to hit the state since 1957. The tornado was the deadliest in the U.S. since 1947, making it the 7th deadliest tornado in American history, but the 27th deadliest in the world.

History[link]

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis

Indigenous peoples inhabited Missouri for thousands of years before European exploration and settlement. Archaeological excavations along the rivers have shown continuous habitation for more than 7,000 years. Beginning before 1000 CE, there arose the complex Mississippian culture, whose people created regional political centers at present-day St. Louis and across the Mississippi River at Cahokia, near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. Their large cities included thousands of individual residences, but they are known for their surviving massive earthwork mounds, built for religious, political and social reasons, in platform, ridgetop and conical shapes. Cahokia was the center of a regional trading network that reached from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The civilization declined by 1400 CE, and most descendants left the area long before the arrival of Europeans. St. Louis was at one time known as Mound City by the European Americans, because of the numerous surviving prehistoric mounds, since lost to urban development. The Mississippian culture left mounds throughout the middle Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, extending into the southeast as well as the upper river.

The first European settlers were mostly ethnic French Canadians, who created their first settlement in Missouri at present-day Ste. Genevieve, about an hour south of St. Louis. They had migrated about 1750 from the Illinois Country. They came from colonial villages on the east side of the Mississippi River, where soils were becoming exhausted and there was insufficient river bottom land for the growing population. Ste. Genevieve became a thriving agricultural center, producing enough surplus wheat, corn and tobacco to ship tons of grain annually downriver to Lower Louisiana for trade. Grain production in the Illinois Country was critical to the survival of Lower Louisiana and especially the city of New Orleans.

St. Louis was founded soon after by French from New Orleans in 1764. From 1764 to 1803 European control of the area west of the Mississippi to the northernmost part of the Missouri River basin, called Louisiana, was assumed by the Spanish as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, due to Treaty of Fontainebleau ^[35] (in order to Spain joined with France the war against England). The arrival of the Spanish in St. Louis was in September 1767.

It became the center of a regional fur trade with Native American tribes that extended up the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, which dominated the regional economy for decades. Trading partners of major firms shipped their furs from St. Louis by river down to New Orleans for export to Europe. They provided a variety of goods to traders, for sale and trade with their Native American clients. The fur trade and associated businesses made St. Louis an early financial center and provided the wealth for some to build fine houses and import luxury items. Its location near the confluence of the Illinois River meant it also handled produce from the agricultural areas. River traffic and trade along the Mississippi were integral to the state's economy, and as the area's first major city, St. Louis expanded greatly after the invention of the steamboat and the increased river trade.

Napoleon Bonaparte had gained Louisiana for French ownership from Spain in 1800 under the Treaty of San Ildefonso, after it had been a Spanish colony since 1762. But, the treaty was kept secret. Louisiana remained nominally under Spanish control until a transfer of power to France on November 30, 1803, just three weeks before the cession to the United States.

Part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase by the United States, Missouri earned the nickname "Gateway to the West" because it served as a major departure point for expeditions and settlers heading to the West in the 19th century. St. Charles, just west of St. Louis, was the starting point and the return destination of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which departed up the Missouri River in 1804 to explore the western territories to the Pacific Ocean. St. Louis was a major supply point for decades for parties of settlers heading west.

Ste. Genevieve, one of the oldest towns in the United States

As many of the early American settlers in western Missouri migrated from the Upper South, they brought enslaved African Americans for labor, and a desire to continue their culture and the institution of slavery. They settled predominantly in 17 counties along the Missouri River, in an area of flatlands that enabled plantation agriculture and became known as "Little Dixie". In 1821 the territory was admitted as a slave state in 1821 as part of the Missouri Compromise with a temporary state capitol in St. Charles. In 1826 the capital was shifted to its permanent location of Jefferson City, also on the Missouri.

The state was rocked by the 1812 New Madrid earthquake. Casualties were light due to the sparse population.

Originally the state's western border was a straight line, defined as the meridian passing through the Kawsmouth,^[36] the point where the Kansas River enters the Missouri River. The river has moved since this designation. This line is known as the Osage Boundary.^[37] In 1835 the Platte Purchase was added to the northwest corner of the state after purchase of the land from the native tribes, making the Missouri River the border north of the Kansas River. This addition increased the land area of what was already the largest state in the Union at the time (about 66,500 square miles (172,000 km²) to Virginia's 65,000 square miles (which then included West Virginia).^[38]

In the early 1830s, Mormon migrants from northern states and Canada began settling near Independence and areas just north of there. Conflicts over religion and slavery arose between the 'old settlers' (mainly from the South) and the Mormons (mainly from the North). The Mormon War erupted in 1838. By 1839, with the help of an "Extermination Order" by Governor Lilburn Boggs, the old settlers forcefully expelled the Mormons from Missouri and confiscated their lands.

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri by Missouri painter George Caleb Bingham

Conflicts over slavery exacerbated border tensions among the states and territories. From 1838 to 1839, a border dispute with Iowa over the so-called Honey Lands resulted in both states' calling up militias along the border.

With increasing migration, from the 1830s to the 1860s Missouri's population almost doubled with every decade. Most of the newcomers were American-born, but many Irish and German immigrants arrived in the late 1840s and 1850s. As they were mostly Catholic, they mostly set up their own religious institutions in the state, which had been mostly Protestant. Having fled famine and oppression in Ireland, and revolutionary upheaval in Germany, the immigrants were not sympathetic to slavery. Many settled in cities, where they created a regional and then state network of Catholic churches and schools. Nineteenth-century German immigrants created the wine industry along the Missouri River and the beer industry in St. Louis.

Most Missouri farmers practiced subsistence farming before the Civil War. The majority of those who held slaves had fewer than five each. Planters, defined by historians as those holding twenty slaves or more, were concentrated in the counties known as "Little Dixie", in the central part of the state along the Missouri River. The tensions over slavery had chiefly to do with the future of the state and nation. In 1860 enslaved African Americans made up less than 10% of the state's population of 1,182,012.^[39] In order to control the flooding of farmland and low-lying villages along the Mississippi, the state had completed construction of 140 miles (230 km) of levees along the river by 1860.^[40]

American Civil War[link]

After the secession of Southern states began in 1861, the Missouri legislature called for the election of a special convention on secession. The convention voted decisively to remain within the Union. Pro-Southern Governor Claiborne F. Jackson ordered the mobilization of several hundred members of the state militia who had gathered in a camp in St. Louis for training. Alarmed at this action, Union General Nathaniel Lyon struck first, encircling the camp and forcing the state troops to surrender. Lyon directed his soldiers, largely non-English-speaking German immigrants, to march the prisoners through the streets, and they opened fire on the largely hostile crowds of civilians who gathered around them. Soldiers killed unarmed prisoners as well as men, women and children of St. Louis in the incident that became known as the "St. Louis Massacre".

These events heightened Confederate support within the state. Governor Jackson appointed Sterling Price, president of the convention on secession, as head of the new Missouri State Guard. In the face of Union General Lyon's rapid advance through the state, Jackson and Price were forced to flee the capital of Jefferson City on June 14, 1861. In the town of Neosho, Missouri, Jackson called the state legislature into session. They enacted a secession ordinance. However, even under the Southern view of secession, only the state convention had the sole power to secede. Since the convention was dominated by unionists, and the state was more pro-Union than pro-Confederate in any event, the ordinance of secession adopted by the legislature is generally given little credence. The Confederacy nonetheless recognized it on October 30, 1861.

Price's Raid in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, 1864