Rep. Elizabeth Dennigan, D-East Providence, looks over some material between votes.

PROVIDENCE — With scores of bills still in limbo, the Rhode Island House of Representatives abruptly went into hiatus at 1 a.m. Saturday. Speaker William J. Murphy cited the need to cool off and return for at least a day in July, and again on a regular basis in September, to continue working through Assembly business.

“The actuality is that we’re a full-time legislature now. We’re not the traditional citizens’ legislature that our forefathers created,” Murphy said as he stepped off the rostrum for the last time this month, a decision that surprised the public and many rank-and-file lawmakers.

The speaker insisted that it was always his plan to leave that night, despite the fact that his majority leader, Gordon D. Fox, spent much of Friday’s 10-hour debate reassigning bills to “Monday’s calendar.”

The state Senate, which left hours earlier Friday, after sending the state budget to the governor’s desk, promised to return this week to complete its business, though it did not schedule a specific date.

Exhausted lawmakers, expecting to work through the week, or at least through the night, speculated that the hasty end of business was the result of an unexplained communications breakdown between House and Senate leaders. Even Fox acknowledged they “had not had much discussion with the Senate.”

“I think it’s fair to say I’ve never seen an end of the session like that, though I guess it wasn’t even the end of the session,” said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, who watched the House debate from the gallery above. “It was about as chaotic as it can get. Too many bills, bills being taken out of order and confusion as to what was being voted on.”

Many representatives shuffled out of the chamber frustrated, their legislation stuck part way through the passage process. The legislature failed to close a loophole in the state’s prostitution law that legalizes the act so long as it happens indoors. The issue made national headlines and was set to become a hallmark of this session, but won’t become law unless House and Senate versions are reconciled.

The same was true of the only bill to emerge from the gay-marriage debate: a bid to give same-sex partners the right to make funeral arrangements for their loved ones.

Indeed, the list of unresolved legislation was long.

The House approved a bill granting adult adoptees the right to access their original, unaltered birth certificates. But the plan still needs Senate approval to become law.

A high-profile, labor-backed bill to allow expired schoolteacher contracts to remain in effect until a new agreement is reached was put off until the elusive “Monday calendar,” along with a proposal to assess municipal-impact fees on students at private colleges and universities. The fate of both bills now remains unclear.

Despite the confusion, vigorous debates cropped up as the hours crept on and tensions climbed in the House.

Lawmakers battled over a bill that would allow school districts to decide on their own whether to cease placing bus monitors on elementary school buses.

Weeks ago, the proposal was hailed as an alternative to Governor Carcieri’s bid to wipe out the bus monitor mandate altogether as a way of helping communities save money.

But with the family of Vanessa Ann Pendergast –– a Middletown girl who was struck and killed by a school bus at age 6 –– looking down on them from the gallery, lawmakers denounced it as “the worst piece of legislation” to make it to the floor this year. As the firestorm of criticism intensified, Fox eventually sent the proposal back to committee.

Following another hearty debate, the House easily approved a bill that would bar public identification of police officers in “deadly force” incidents — those involving a killing — until they have been reviewed by a grand jury.

The measure, cosponsored by current and retired police, would conceal the names of officers whether the fatal shooting took place on the job or not.

Supporters say deadly force incidents already place heavy stress on officers and their families. Opponents, including the ACLU, question officers’ rights, as public servants, to secrecy.

Other bills, including Rep. Douglas Gablinske’s proposal permitting the police to obtain search warrants compelling chemical-substance tests for certain drunken drivers, passed with little debate.

For nearly a decade, lawmakers and the attorney general’s office have fought to allow the police to get warrants requiring drunken-driving suspects involved in serious or fatal accidents to undergo blood tests or other screenings.

The issue is a deeply personal one for Gablinske. In 1971, when the Bristol representative was 18, his father was struck and killed by a motorcyclist on the street in front of their Bristol home.

“My own personal story resonated, and sometimes, that’s all that counts up here,” said an emotional Gablinske after the bill was passed. The Senate approved its own version of that legislation in recent days, but neither has passed both chambers.

On a night defined more by what didn’t happen than what did, few high-profile bills were sent to the governor’s desk. Carcieri spokeswoman Amy Kempe confirmed that apart from budget legislation, the only bills transmitted to the governor late Friday and early Saturday were a proposal born out of a Tiverton pollution incident, raising fines for environmental polluters and a bid to rename the Kent County Courthouse.

“It seemed a lot more confusing than usual and certainly the [House] ending confirmed that,” said Brown of the ACLU. “There wasn’t an ending. After six months in session, they’re taking a brief vacation.”

Democratic leaders, including Murphy, acknowledge that the 2009 legislative session thus far was defined by the budget. With the country’s economic recession as a backdrop, efforts to close Rhode Island’s largest shortfall in decades and adopt the $7.8-billion budget has eclipsed much of the Assembly’s other business.

“We said in January that the budget was going to be the issue this year and it was,” Murphy said early Saturday morning. “I think once we got that over with Wednesday night, Thursday morning, people have had a long month, the Fourth of July is next week, we need a couple weeks to cool off.”

With reports from Journal Staff Writer Philip Marcelo

kgregg@projo.com