Last week, outgoing SGA President Lillian Roth vetoed a bill that would have added student organization seating to the SGA code of laws. The senate is working to codify student organization seating after it was removed from the constitution last month during SGA elections. Ms. Roth gave several reasons for her veto, but one in particular raises some interesting questions. She asked that no members of The Machine be able to serve on the Board of Governors that would oversee the organization seating process.
What this assumes is that members of The Machine will be open about their membership in an organization with a long history of secrecy. Yes, Jared Hunter used his openness about Machine membership to leverage some non-Machine support in the most recent election. However, the issue with The Machine was never just secrecy. Even though his affiliation was out in the open, Jared Hunter continued to act like a Machine-made man. He committed several election violations and put forward a platform that was less fleshed out than his incumbent opponent; and like so many Machine candidates, he won.
Allegations against The Machine have always been not just of secrecy, but of back-room dealing, discrimination and intimidation. As we saw with Jared Hunter, acknowledging affiliation doesn’t end participation.
What the SGA needs is not an official party system, though that would probably help. What it needs is an Ethics Commission. This commission wouldn’t declaw the Judicial Board. They would assist in overseeing the SGA in a way the Judicial Board cannot currently incorporate into their workload, to include Roth’s wariness about Machine members on the Board of Governors making it difficult for smaller organizations and non-Greek organizations to get student organization seating. This plays into the question of where an Ethics Commission would come from.
If its members were elected, the Commission would in all likelihood face the issues as other elections. Machine candidates would have the support of Alabama’s large Greek system, whether the members were really willing or not. If candidates were appointed by the president and confirmed by the SGA, they would be unlikely to investigate ethics violations against the very president who appointed them. Non-Machine appointees would also face the resistance that Elliot Spillers’ Chief of Staff nominee faced. How can we remove politics from the process? We probably can’t, but we can diminish their effect.
The victims of a biased Board of Governors would be student organizations. An ethics commission should come from the ranks of that group. The University has 530 registered student organizations – 62 of them are Greek. If the officers of those 530 organizations were to elect the members of an Ethics Commission from among their own ranks, their choices would likely represent a broad cross section of the University’s student population and interests. Such a commission would be more removed from SGA politics than even the Judicial Board.
SGA doesn’t have a great history on ethical politics. They’ve learned it honestly from Alabama state politics. Even at the state level, though, there are procedures in place to deal with violations of Alabama’s trust. SGA needs the same. We need a non-partisan Ethics Commission to make sure all students are fairly treated by the government that they’ve chosen to represent them.
Allison Mollenkamp is a junior majoring in English and theatre. Her column runs biweekly.
