The Student Government judiciary committee met Sunday and unanimously voted down two amendments and tabled a Senate bill.
The committee voted not to amend Senate rules and procedures to limit the amount of committees senators can serve on from two to one. Currently, eight senators serve on more than one committee.
Senator Olin Calvin (Inspire, Graduate-07) authored the amendment and said four judiciary committee members who serve on other committees were biased because they didn’t want to lose their positions.
“I’m also concerned there might have been a conflict of interest in their decision,” he said about Senators Libby Shaw (Impact, Sophomore-03), Angel Zavala (Impact, Liberal Arts-04), Dylan Santalo (Impact, District A-08) and Graham Boone (Impact, Sophomore-06).
Senator Emily Dempsey (Impact, District A-01) said she doesn’t think there’s a problem with senators serving in two committees.
“There’s many ways to serve your constituency in Senate, like working on projects or advocating for your constituency through resolutions,” she said.
The committee also unanimously failed an amendment that would call for senators to report other senators to the Senate president if they were using social media during meetings. If senators were caught on multiple occasions, they’d be referred to the rules and ethics committee for further investigation.
Dempsey said the committee failed the legislation because the process for the rules and ethics committee was unclear and could be a distraction in Senate meetings because it would interrupt the meeting.
Dempsey said the authors should instead write a resolution, which is more informal than an amendment, or talk to the Senate president to remind senators to not use their phones during meetings.
“I definitely think it’s something my committee believes could be helped,” Dempsey said.
Calvin said he thinks some of the co-authors of the social media amendment will write a resolution.
“It was good to hear from the committee that they agree that this is an issue,” he said. “I think a resolution will still be a good idea.”
The judiciary committee also tabled a Senate bill to put closed captioning on all videos in SG to give it an opportunity to go to the code revision committee before coming back to them.
Contact Christina Morales at cmorales@alligator.org. Follow her on Twitter at @Christina_M18.
