After serving for more than a year on the ASUO Constitution Court, Robert Raschio resigned from his post as chief justice Thursday — but not without getting in his final words.
Before graduating and moving on from the student version of the judicial system, Raschio fired off a letter of resignation that offered his suggestions to student government leaders and detailed his complaints about the role the court has taken on this year. The full text of the letter can be found on today’s Perspectives page.
“It just doesn’t feel like, you know, that anybody ever comes to [the court] for anything other than elections violations,” Raschio said. The court seems to have become “the supreme [Elections] Board of the University of Oregon.”
During the ASUO elections late winter term and early spring term, grievances on campaign violations flooded the court, starting and stopping the general election two times. It all culminated in a 5-hour-long night of grievance hearings just before spring break.
This is not what the court is supposed to be doing, Raschio said. It’s supposed to be a resource for students, which is why he spent time this year trying to get the court’s new EMU office up and running. Instead, justices have either been exceptionally good or exceptionally bad about fulfilling their office hours, the court is unsure whether its office space is completely its own, and the only things the court has dealt with all year have been election-time grievances.
“Student government is this big, big experiment,” Raschio said. “It’s the first time most young people get a chance to touch power.”
But this year, the ASUO student government has not been running as it should, he said. Having student government set up in three branches is a good idea because, just like a real democracy, it provides for checks and balances, Raschio said. But the problem is that this year those checks and balances have not been happening, he said.
“I don’t think the Exec paid any attention to [the court] this year,” Raschio said. “It just kind of feels like we’re all down our own separate tracks. We don’t check each other.”
ASUO State Affairs Coordinator Brian Tanner, however, said the interaction between the different branches of the government is what one makes of it. Tanner said the court’s duty is to rule on grievances and to make sure that programs and groups are behaving in accordance with the Green Tape Notebook, which contains the rules governing the ASUO.
“I understand there was some bad communication between the court and the ASUO Executive,” Tanner said. But Raschio has “got that opportunity to step in with [ASUO President Jay Breslow] and say ‘you need to do this and this.’”
While there have not been any significant violations this year, Raschio said, certain provisions of the Green Tape Notebook were ignored — especially things such as timelines. Breslow has had trouble appointing students to open student government spots in time, which led two students to attempt a recall of the ASUO president late fall term.
Raschio blamed much of the complications on late starts. But he added there are other problems involved with the running of this year’s student government.
“It just seems like there’s this general lack of commitment to the idea of student government,” Raschio said. “There’s a lot of committed people in student government, but … it seems like everybody’s running on their own agendas without concern for the institution.”
Tanner, however, said that was not an accurate description.
“We worked together as a team all year. It would have been nice if Rob [Raschio] had spent some time in the office,” he said. “I didn’t see any court justices at all until the elections.”
The problems were not always among branches of government, Raschio said. Toward the end of last term, the court began to face problems of its own.
Internal conflicts developed on the court, Raschio said, in the form of two factions professing different ideologies. Eventually that turmoil led former justice Richard Jameson to resign late in winter term after writing a letter in which he called the court a “kangaroo court.”
Raschio also said there were huge personality conflicts on the court, contending that “people came in with a very specific agenda” — and pointing directly at Justice Alan Tauber.
Tauber stopped the ballot measure election after the first day of voting when five senators filed a grievance against the Multicultural Center’s measure. Raschio said such “behavior was unacceptable.”
Tauber could not be reached for comment before press time.
Raschio, however, maintained that meddling with the referendum system, which was what he said Tauber was trying to do, was not something the court should do.
Soon the court divided in two, with Tauber and Jameson against Raschio and future Chief Justice Sara Pirk, Raschio said. Justice Ahsan Awan remained in the middle, he said, acting as mediator.
Awan said while he considered himself a swing vote on many issues, he was unwilling to comment on the presence of factions within the court.
“There are obviously differing viewpoints,” Awan said.
With Jameson gone, Raschio’s resignation and Awan’s graduation making his resignation “highly expected,” Tauber and Pirk may soon be the only two justices still around, Awan said.
Tanner said it is Breslow’s duty to appoint new justices within the next few weeks he has remaining in office. If he does not, Tanner said, incoming executive leaders Nilda Brooklyn and Joy Nair will have 30 days to do so.
Awan said he hopes confirmations to the two open justice positions will come during the next ASUO Student Senate meeting. He added there is already one candidate who has impressed both Breslow and senate President Peter Watts.
Although no one could say for sure, Tauber may also be facing potential removal from the court because he has not enrolled in a sufficient amount of credits this term.
Pirk will be the perfect starting point to kick the court’s momentum back into gear, Raschio said.
“She’s a good person to build the court around,” Raschio said. “She’s far smarter than I am.”
Tanner said he hoped Brooklyn and Nair learn to improve communication between next year’s court and the Executive office. Awan said he was confident the two can start off on the right foot.
“I think the next court will do a better job of keeping it together,” Awan said. “And I think the next student government will do a better job of bringing people [to the court] that can work together.”