A New Year, A New Finance Bill

This one has been kicking around in my head for a while, but I think it's something I'd like to try to get done this year.

The basic premise has been discussed before: Allowing students to choose where some of their student fee money goes.

There has been a lot of discussion about setting up an online system, which would be great, but very difficult to implement.

I've given it a bit of thought, and I think the best way to do it is to put a document online that a student can fill out, singling out one organization that they want to receive half of their student fee money.

The forms would obviously include GWids, Names, etc, to ensure that students could only fill out one a year. The forms would have to be turned in to the SA office prior to initial allocations.

Then, there would be a rule essentially saying that the finance committee must allocated AT LEAST the amount of money that students have earmarked to whatever organization. The finance committee may, of course, give more.

In order to prevent a ton of different orgs only getting forms from 1 or 2 people, you could set a floor for this program, say, $150. At least $150 must be earmarked by students or else the finance committee can ignore the requests.

This program would allow smaller orgs with only, say, 10 members or so to ensure that they would get a fairer shake at funding.

It would also, of course, lead to more choice and more student control of student government, something I've always advocated.

So, any thoughts on my plan? Tim Miller told me it would never pass, but I've beaten the odds before.

Food for thought

Fee Fighters: Should Students be forced to subsidize campus activities?

Most of you know I'm not a fan of our student fee. This is an old article that I found the other day, detailing legal efforts against mandatory student fees. A student at the university wasn't too pleased with where his fee money would go:

He was even less pleased when he learned he had no right to choose which groups would receive his contribution. So when the university refused to refund his money, Southworth and two classmates took the school and 18 campus groups to court. "I didn't think it was right that the university forced us to pay for student activities with which we disagreed," recalls Southworth, now a researcher for the Wisconsin state legislature. "It wouldn't matter if it was 5 or 10 cents. It's the principle."

The suit, Southworth v. Grebe, was filed in April 1996 by an affiliate of the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group. In August 1997, U.S. District Court Judge John Shabaz found in Southworth's favor, and the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit upheld the decision in August 1998. The judges not only supported Southworth's contention that the fees violated his First Amendment rights but struck down the university's argument that subsidizing political activities was "germane" to its educational mission.

Of course, GW is a private university and can do whatever it wants with its money. But the principals are, I feel, the same.

That's all for now. How's everything going?

Here's hopin'

GW needs to get in on this.

Imagine if the SA President had an SA NSA. We could wire tap Emily Cahn, conduct political assasinations, and tail dissidents (5$ to the poor soul who follows me around, watching me sleep AND eat alone, night after night).

From the "Yup, same thing" files...

Kyle Boyer's glorious facebook status:




No word yet on whether Mousavi will start a "Iranian Impact Group" to promote Iranian spirit (and promote local delis).

PS: Please don't hate me, Kyle.

OPEN THREAD: Priorities for Next Year

Last year over the summer, we had a bunch of open threads to foster discussion. They were well-commented and I think enjoyed, so here's another one:

What do you think the SA should focus on next year? What should our priorities be? What do you want out of your SA?

I'm turning off comment moderation for the purposes of having an open thread, so I fully expect half the comments to be fat jokes!

Is it that time of year again?

SA Leaders make traditional beginning of the year empty promises which have nothing to do with what they'll actually do.

I'm feeling lazy right now (as per the usual),

so just insert your own pithy commentary about how stupid this yearly ritual is.

DEJA VU: Rules Committee Chairman Wants New Constitution

From an email sent to members of the Rules Committee by Jamie Baker, Chairman:

There will be a Constitutional Task Force, headed by me, that will investigate different possibilities of a new constitution for this year. This is a combined effort between Senate Leadership and Executive Leadership. Once details are ironed out, I will let you all know.

If any of you are saying to yourselves, 'didn't we have a rules chairman last year who spent a ton of time working on a constitution that ended up sucking', then you know more about the SA than you should.

Unfortunately, this has become something of a trend in SA politics.

The SA sucks and is, for the most part, worthless. Therefore, something must be wrong with the institution!

NEWS FLASH: The SA sucks because the people IN IT suck. The constitution we have now doesn't make you toolish, ineffective, or prone to petty infighting.

It's long past time for members of the SA to take responsibility for their own failings. Nicole and Brand proved that good advocacy and governance CAN happen under our current constitution.

Plus, I'm sure the new constitution will retain many of the ideas of the rush job put forward at the end of the year. That proposed constitution sucked, and I have faith that, if they try hard enough, this new one will suck too.