When I joined the Unite Party in fall 2010, I was inspired by its rhetoric about bringing the campus together. When I was elected to the Student Senate on the party's ticket, I was excited to work to improve our campus. However, with every passing week, I've grown more and more dismayed about how the party's words are always different from its actions.
Last Tuesday's Senate meeting was no different.
Despite claiming to support compromise, transparency and a desire to engage constituents, the Unite Party leadership did the exact opposite with every chance it got.During public debate, a Unite Party committee chairman objected to extending the speaking time of a constituent completely unaffiliated with SG, one who came to speak about legislation that upset her.
Later in the meeting, a compromise was proposed to a set of bills that were opposed by Unite in committee. The bills were designed to see if agency heads and cabinet directors, some of whom control budgets in the hundreds of thousands, were doing their jobs. The compromise was more than reasonable. But instead, the Unite Party majority shot down the amendment and killed the bills. Total debate: 7.2 seconds per senator.
Next, in one of the most drastic changes to Senate procedures in the last three years, the entirety of the Unite Party super-majority voted to strip minority party senators of their ability to effectively represent their constituents. After these changes, the Senate President (Unite's leader in the Senate) gains far greater control over the legislative process.
Total debate: Three seconds per senator
As though all of those actions were not hypocritical enough, the final bill showed exactly where the Unite Party stands on student involvement in SG elections: against it. After only a few minutes of questions, senators, including the former Supervisor of Elections (now a Unite-voting senator), spoke against and voted down plans to advertise SG elections on Facebook and to use larger signs to alert students of polling locations. Total debate: 3.6 seconds per senator.
I joined the Unite Party because I agreed with its message of transparency, its professed ideology of increasing constituent outreach and its willingness to compromise. I see now that these platform points were all a farce to get elected. After three years of unwavering Unite Party control, it's time for a change.
Carly Wilson is a member of the UF Student Senate.
