A message from the Speaker about USR 108-171

Note: all views contained in this message are Speaker Liam Kiley's and do not represent the views of the Senate itself or of other individual senators.

I have spent the past two weeks attempting to avoid impeaching Devin Duncan. At this time, however, it has become clear to me that the only remaining tool at my disposal is impeachment, and I am thus inclined to support Speaker Pro Tempore Robert Battle's impeachment resolution. I do believe, however, that every student ought to understand, in simple terms, why this is happening now.

On Tuesday, September 15th, the Senate rejected USD 108-142, which would have confirmed a student to the Chief of Police Advisory Committee. As Speaker, I do not vote except to break ties, but from what I've heard from other Senators, the nay votes were either due to the nominee's general lack of preparation or due to concerns about statements they had made in support of surveillance on campus. I initially assumed it to be more of the latter, but I have now come to believe it was more of the former. Either way, the student was rejected and I assumed we'd continue with business as usual.

I was wrong. The next day, I received an email from President Duncan threatening that if the student was not confirmed, he would be appointed without the advice and consent of the Senate. I believe that the President understood that this proposed route was illegal, as he attempted to justify it with two different explanations: viewpoint discrimination and the delegated power of the University.

With regard to viewpoint discrimination, it was claimed to me that the Senate could not make decisions on confirmations based on political positions. Ignoring the lack of preparation concerns that were most likely the primary reason for rejection, this line of argument doesn't stack up if you think about it for more than two seconds. The Senate is a political body weighing a political appointment to a committee that deals with politics. This kind of interpretation is out of line with both the law and any reasonable person's understanding of logic. If a student is appointed to the Student Library Advisory Board and says we should close Davis for good and give all the libraries' funding to Bill Belichick, it should be the Senate's right to vote against that person on the sole grounds that their political view is out of line with the student body.

With regard to the delegated power of the University, the President cited the University Sponsored Organizations memo, which outlines the University functions that Student Government can carry out. Notably, the Senate may allocate student fee funds, and the Executive Branch can make appointments to University Committees. The President's contention was that the delegated authority to the executive branch to make such appointments cannot be regulated or subject to any oversight in any way, and that the Senate could thus not reject appointments made to the Chief of Police Advisory Committee. There are a couple of issues with this (most importantly, the appointment power in question is actually performed by the Vice President), but these aren't even relevant here because the Chief of Police Advisory Committee is not a University Committee. It was established only a couple years ago by Student Government itself. The University never delegated authority to appoint to that board because the University never held that power in the first place.

Even at that point, I was not interested in impeachment. I communicated to the President that I would move forward with that option if he chose to ignore the Senate and re-appoint the student to the Chief of Police Advisory Committee, but if we could appoint them to a different role, we could all walk away happy and I could get back to doing actual policy projects that actually affect students. While it initially seemed like the President was on board, I later learned that the student had again been appointed to the Chief of Police Advisory Committee in direct violation of the law.

This was the point where I began to support impeachment. This year, the Senate has worked to grant the executive branch funding even when it failed to meet the funding request deadline. Out of over fifty external appointments, only one has been rejected, even after external appointments were made incorrectly and the Senate had to step in to give the appointers updated information. I believe the Senate did this because we have real positions and a real interest in providing for students, but I now realize that our forgiveness of mistakes in the past could be misinterpreted as a blank check for President Duncan to consolidate power and simply go around those that disagree with him.

I have told countless people that my goal for this year was zero impeachments, but I alone cannot prevent that. It is contingent upon other members of Student Government not clinging so tightly to blatantly illegal and authoritarian acts that they refuse to back down and accept simple compromise solutions. In this situation, it is at least my hope that the process is quick and we can return to delivering tangible benefits for the Student Body.

Liam Kiley

Speaker of the 108th Undergraduate Senate