Since it first met last year after elections, the current Student Senate has been bogged down by procedural nonsense and fighting amongst themselves. Last Thursday’s meeting was no exception. Every year at this time, the Senate devotes its time to reviewing and either confirming or rejecting nominees for the next calendar year’s Judicial Board. The reactions of the Senate to this meeting varies from year to year; last year’s Senate treated it with little regard and spent most of the time joking. This year, however, the Senate followed what has become its tradition and swung to the other side of the spectrum.
The tone for the night was set when, early on in the proceedings, Grand Marshal Mike Dillon complained to Judicial Board Chair Suba Ganesan that all the nominees were presented at once, instead of in smaller groups. Ganesan shot back that Dillon should not tell her how to do her job. For the length of the meeting, senators fired a barrage of questions at the nominees, wondered at the “contemptive disregard” of nominees who were not present, and then tabled, untabled, and finally rejected one motion to approve a candidate.
It is well within the Senate’s rights to question the nominees that are brought before them. In fact, it is their responsibility. The careful system of checks and balances set up within the Union Constitution was created to ensure that the best possible candidates make it onto the J-Board. Still, any system of checks and balances requires trust, and we find it alarming how little faith the Senate has in its own representatives and in the other branches of student government. Nominees presented to the Senate last week had already been through an application and interview process which vetted the list of candidates until the best were obvious. But there was no confidence in this system, with one Senator saying that he felt the process was not really all that selective since it had a higher acceptance rate than a community college. Some of the nominees, in fact all those whose appointments were not confirmed, had already successfully served on the board for multiple years after being confirmed in previous years. This Senate, however, felt it necessary to grill all the candidates once again, with Dillon saying that he was not going to “blindly trust” the selection committee.
We are not asking for blind trust. However, as with any organization, to accomplish goals there must be some trust, and if the Student Senate actually wants to improve student life, they will need to get over believing they are the only student government branch whose opinions matter and start providing the student body with tangible accomplishments, rather than spending their valuable time questioning fellow students for three and a half hours.
