When students vote for the new president of the Student Government Association on March 1 to 3, they will also consider an amendment to the SGA constitution.
The senate passed the amendment, Ballot Measure 52001, Wednesday night after the SGA debate. The measure will eliminate redundancies about impeachment in the constitution, legalize some responsibilities the courts have already been doing and rename the Judicial Branch to the Supreme Court of the Student Government Association.
“The Judicial Branch was not so much under-utilized as it was under-performing,” Chief Justice Canyon Sanford said. “There were just a lot things that were going on that we saw really didn’t make the Judicial Branch effective. It was conflicting, and it was redundant.”
Sanford co-authored the measure with Speaker of the Senate Hugo Salinas, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences senator Elliot Kauffman, Cullen College of Engineering senator Clint Kirchhoff and Chief of Staff Adrian Castillo.
Most of the amendment focuses on more clearly establishing the powers of the Supreme Court.
“I think it’s important to know that most of the changes we made in the constitution — in terms of what people notice and what people see — won’t really change much,” Kauffman said. “But behind the scenes and what makes things tick (will be) more efficient and legal.”
In line with removing redundancies from the constitution, rules dealing with impeachment which had previously appeared in many different articles in the constitution, were struck and a new article was added dealing with that topic exclusively.
In addition, the authors struck a variety of statements regarding impeachment from the constitution and replaced them with a new article that deals solely with that topic.
“Not necessarily impeachment, but things like attendance polices… weren’t being followed as much, and that gave some senators or members of the branch reason to not necessarily give their all (and) want to move meetings faster,” Sanford said. “We wanted to make sure, since we saw the redundancies and knew we had to fix it in some way.”
The measure passed in SGA with 22 ayes, one nay and one abstention. The measure will now move to a general vote by the students on the same ballot as the SGA president.
