In an unprecedented move, amid rumors Senate President Peter Groff would be departing to take a position in the Obama administration, leaders from both sides of the aisle agreed to send the state budget — known as the Long Bill — back to the Joint Budget Committee for retooling. The committee, made up of four Democrats and two Republicans, lobbed the bill right back to the state Senate, with members saying they’d done the digging and there were no more cuts to be found.

State Sen. Moe Keller, a Wheat Ridge Democrat and chairwoman of the budget panel, rejected the state Senate’s rejection. She told The Denver Post’s Tim Hoover it was “extremely frustrating and exasperating” that both Democrats and Republicans thought the JBC hadn’t done its job.

One of Keller’s colleagues, who’s already raised the ire of state GOP leaders for crossing his party on budget matters, gave Hoover a more colorful reaction to the suggestion the committee had dropped the ball:

Rep. Don Marostica, R-Loveland, went further.

“Nuts to them,” he said. “Tell them to go jump in a lake. [Senate Minority Leader] Josh Penry first, and then all the lemmings will follow.

“We did look hard enough.”

The “lemmings,” in Marostica’s estimation, probably wouldn’t include state Sen. Al White, the Hayden Republican who co-sponsored a bill with Marostica to move $500 million in assets from Pinnacol Assurance, a quasi-governmental agency that insures state worker’s compensation claims, to cover the $300 million cut in higher education funding proposed by the Joint Budget Committee. That measure, Senate Bill 273, passed the state Senate 19-14 mostly along party lines late Thursday, with White voting in favor with the majority Democrats and Democratic state Sens. Dan Gibbs of Summit County and Paula Sandoval of Denver siding with Republicans against the bill.

Penry blasted the move, warning lawmakers against counting on the fund transfer, which he said would likely be bogged down in litigation over whether the state has the authority to raid Pinnacol Assurance assets.

“That’s the problem with this budget,” Penry said, according to Colorado Senate News, the Senate GOP’s publicity site. “It’s built on shifting sand.”

The bills come up before the state Senate again on Monday for a final vote.

The Democratic majority wouldn’t budge or break. After 10 hours, partisans on either side of the floor had clearly read into the record all the campaign trail fodder that could be transcribed. They were tired and getting sloppy.

The long-hoarse voice of Sen. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, had by that point crawled to the bottom of his throat to be heard no more.

A half-hour earlier, Sen. Jennifer Veiga, D-Denver, yawned and stretched and yawned and then mistakenly stood up to cast a “yes” vote on one of Sen. Mike Kopp’s, R-Littleton, interminable “girder-continuous bridge” amendments. Pulled down by a colleague, she snapped into her seat and let loose a peal of horrified laughter.

Sen. Shawn Mitchell, R-Broomfield, arch-defender of spending caps on social programs, had earlier said without irony that he wanted people to go hungry — meaning the senators assembled for the filibuster, one must presume — but then he disappeared for most of the last three grueling hours of debate.

The day had started with shocked members of the minority railing against a threatened gag rule, which would have limited debate to five hours. Now the Democrats made good on the threat and put an end to the mind-numbing reading of proposed amendments.

The surprise gag-rule invocation steamed Minority Leader Penry.

“This is unprecedented,” he said. He went on to decry the abuse of power and added that one-time Democratic president of the senate Joan Fitz-Gerald said that she would never run the Senate like this, that she would make it bipartisan and, basically, that those assembled for the majority here today should be ashamed of themselves, et cetera.

Sen. Moe Keller, D-Wheat Ridge, who took to the speaker’s podium next, was having none of it.

“This is not unprecedented,” she said. This “doesn’t compare to (the districting fight) of 2003, where Republican majority leaders slipped a secret bill through in the last days of the session and held secret committee meetings, insulting the minority,” she said.

Weary nods followed on the eastern side of the hall.

Then Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, shocked — shocked! — at the hypocrisy visited upon the Senate and always ready with his laptop, took the podium and read out a line he Googled, perhaps from Fitz-Gerald, about the evils of partisan unfairness in regard to the rules of the Senate.

“Same thing, different day,” he said, nodding his chin with finality even as his exhausted colleagues were already making their way toward the door.