By Graduate Senator Robert Topinka
How We Betrayed the Legislative Process (and Let BSU Pay the Price)
We need rules and rule scholars at Student Senate. But we also need to remember that we are (hopefully) contributing to democracy. Sometimes our appeals to Student Senate’s seriousness sound like an effort to convince ourselves. But if we think we live in a democratic society (email me if you want to talk lies and conspiracy theories) then we should not need to justify operating as part of a democratic governing body. It’s sorta what America is supposed to do, right? We’re working the national machine. Good for us.
But neither should we ignore the sometimes nasty repercussions of that democratic process. When the Black Student Union showed up en masse to finance, they were stacking the meeting. But the thing is, that’s the whole idea. They were following the law of democracy that all of us have at one time or another invoked: majority rules. Otherwise, why add up the votes?
So maybe we don’t like it. Maybe they didn’t go through their Senate paces. Their actions were not technically against the rules, but it just doesn’t sit right with the way we think Senate should do things. Unfortunately, though, that’s what rules are. Technicalities. Stringently applied. If we don’t like a group’s actions but have set no rule against it, that’s our bad.
I suppose it’s not as simple was democratically hijacking the finance committee. There is the issue of the “exception,” which (eek) called up the specter of “special privileges.” Does BSU deserve its own rule about travel? Probably not. But was a bonanza of travel requests looming if we granted one? Not if we had passed Alex Earle’s amendment, which would have allowed the BSU to travel the one time and offered no further guarantees. Wouldn’t this have made more sense? The BSU came to the first session it could and asked for the money as soon as they could present a detailed description of the costs. They showed up in numbers (gasp!) to a democratic event and exercised their right to vote that they had earned by complying with Senate rules. Yet they won’t be attending the conference they’ve attended for 32 consecutive years because we didn’t like how we had written our own rules, and then we were possessed with the pressing need to close a loophole that Senate exploited a month earlier.
