If Neil Brown has anything to do with it, this year’s Student Senate will be one of the most effective in memory. While the 2006-07 Senate was plagued by controversy and internal conflict, Brown and other new senators hope to change things for the better.
Brown, who served as vice chairman of the Summer Senate, is one of several senators who ran on a campaign of fiscal responsibility and ethics reform. He said one of the first orders of business when the Senate reconvenes will be to present a large bill that among other things, includes new guidelines for how senators should conduct themselves during meetings.
“Hopefully, we’ll learn from the mistakes of last year,” Brown said. “Ethics (reform) is a means to a greater end.”
Sen. Kate Jones, who served as chairwoman of the Summer Senate, has been working on developing the ethical code. She said that while it’s “hard to make ethics rules hard and fast,” she hopes that among other things, the new code will create a set of rules governing appropriate behavior in meetings.
Brown and other members of the ASUO have been discussing the need for an ethics policy for quite some time, but the idea has been expressed more since last spring, when fellow senators brought charges of ethical violations against Sen. Nate Gulley.
The charges against Gulley stemmed from a meeting in which he voted to fund a trip he would be attending while other senators attending the same trip abstained from the vote. The complaint against him also involved a statement he made to the Emerald accusing other senators of “racist attacks” against student programs. Brown said Gulley’s case “exposed the flaws in the system” in a year that “saw the ASUO falling apart.”
The single biggest problem an ethics policy should address, Brown said, is the problem of conflict-of-interest votes, which Brown called “nearly criminal.”
The code Jones has worked on says that senators can join groups and even vote on overall funding for their groups but defines when a vote would cross the line into a conflict of interest.
ASUO President Emily McLain said she has read the draft and likes that it gives a specific definition of conflict of interest without discouraging senators from joining groups.
“I think it’s nice that they’ve explained that they do want senators to be in groups, to advocate for groups,” she said.
In a recent e-mail, Gulley wrote that he would not change anything about his actions last year, including voting to fund the trip he was attending.
“I think instituting an ethics policy is a fantastical waste of time,” Gulley wrote. “There is already a system in place, one that has actual checks and balances, for dealing with ethical issues. … Any ethics policy would be redundant and mere politicking.”
Sen. Athan Papailiou, speaking by phone, said that conflict of interest is difficult to prove and there should be a system that will “democratically determine whether or not a vote was a conflict of interest.”
A policy that holds senators accountable for “unethical” behavior would create an atmosphere where more students feel comfortable coming before the Senate for requests, Papailiou said.
Gulley wrote senators need to focus on making the Senate a comfortable, fair place for everyone. He said he thought ethics reform would simply make the situation worse.
“Senators need to spend their time learning about other students,” he said.
The case of a senator removed from her job for non-fulfillment of duties highlighted the problems that arise from internal conflicts, Brown said.
Last year, on the same day of Gulley’s ethics hearing, then-Senate President Sara Hamilton was removed from the Senate by the ASUO Constitution Court – the body that oversees the Executive and Senate and enforces the ASUO rules – after a fellow Senator filed a grievance against her for failing to send out meeting agendas 48 hours in advance of meetings.
The court ruled that Hamilton, who was running for ASUO president at the time, was in fact in dereliction of her duties as Senate president. Under the terms of Senate rules, there was no recourse but to remove her entirely from the Senate.
At the time, Hamilton expressed concern that her case could set a precedent that would allow senators to file petty politically motivated grievances against one another for any violation of rules such as missing office hours. In theory, any violation of such rules could lead to a senator’s removal from office.
In a recent interview, Hamilton said she doesn’t feel that a policy that creates new rules can legislate people’s behavior.
“There’s a difference between ethics – what’s legally acceptable – what’s morally wrong isn’t necessarily illegal,” she said.
Although Gulley’s accusations of racism in an Emerald article last spring were the catalyst that led to the ethics charges against him, Brown said the goal of the new ethics policy will not be to place “hard and fast rules” on what senators can or can not say, adding he will oppose any restrictions placed on free speech.
Brown said he would like to see a new reform policy that involves a better system of record-keeping in the hopes of creating more “institutional memory” for the ASUO. This would not only make things easier on each year’s new leaders, but would make it easier for students and campus media to know what is going on within the ASUO.
“It all kind of weaves together,” he said. “A more transparent government weaves into a more effective government.”