Student Government Association President Jamal Taylor urged a vote of no confidence for Residential Life Director D.J. Baker Wednesday in a special session meeting of the Student Senate.
Taylor’s urging came before the Senate tackled four pieces of old legislation and heard the first reading of another in the Henton Room of the Smith-Brown Memorial Union.
Baker has been the cause of contention among many dorm-living students following a town hall meeting two weeks ago, in which he proposed several new policies and procedures. Many of them were met with dissension among the students present, spawning complaints to Taylor to request Baker’s termination.
Craig Burrell, a proxy for Sen. Sabrina Whitley, proposed to begin the legislative body’s paperwork to join the executive’s ‘vote of no confidence.’ Vice-President Philip Wallace requested proper documentation to be presented to the Senate before voting.
As all but one Senate bill proposed change to the student’s constitution, all members were required to attend the meeting, and vote on each bill. Several senators sent proxies, or a person authorized to act for another, in order to have a full body of 21 members.
Sen. Phillip Robinson followed Taylor with Senate Bill 2, also known as the “You Can Do It” Act. SB 2 proposed raising the grade-point averages of the four top government officials — president, vice-president, chief justice and Miss Southern from 2.5 to a 3.0. The bill was later amended for candidates to maintain the average throughout qualification and the academic term with a 2.8 GPA.
“We should promote overall excellence in our student government. These people are heads of government; they control budgets, they have a lot of power,” Robinson said before the body. Senators voted 18-3, three votes short of the needed unanimous vote for constitutional changes.
After a passionate argument defending his bill, Robinson changed course as he requested the body reconsider Senate Bill 5, which proposed eliminating the constitutional exam for potential candidates for student office. That proposal failed to pass in its committee, also failing to garner reconsideration from the legislative body.
The Code of Ethics package, proposed by Sen. Demetrius Sumner, took the longest to debate, eliminating the one-fourth-page passage within the Bylaws to a separate 10-page publication.
Sumner took the floor after watching two bills fail, telling the remaining members present that they had two choices — to either pass or fail the bill.
“Now, I’m looking in some of your faces and I already see about three ‘nays,'” he said.
“We have two choices, we can accept it for what it is, telling these people ‘be good, don’t lie.’ It establishes new penalties, and defines unethical behavior, and a means to solve it.”
The body voted 18-1 to pass the bill, striking out Article 1 of the Bylaws after a lengthy discussion amending the package.
The remaining pieces of legislation — Senate Bills 10 and 18 — were unable to be voted upon because a voting quorum was lost.
The next meeting will be on March 18 in the Lakefront Room of the Union.
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SGA seeks vote of no confidence
March 6, 2009
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