Proposed amendments revamp constitution

By James Cancelarich     1/28/25 11:42pm

The Student Association Constitutional Revisions Committee announced four potential constitutional amendments at a Jan. 27 Senate meeting. The amendments include correcting typos, restructuring the blanket tax allocations process, clarifying election rules and potentially reshaping the power structure of the Senate. 

In total, the current proposals encompass over 100 changes. These amendments will be presented on the spring ballot after discussion and editing by the Senate.

Also under consideration is an amendment to increase the blanket tax from $85 to $90 to account for inflation and a bylaw amendment to establish an academics commission. These amendments are not part of the CRC’s proposed changes.

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Currently, Senate resolutions and amendments to bylaws require a two-thirds majority of voting members of the Senate. The constitutional amendment reduces this to a simple majority but gives the SA president veto power, which can be overridden by a two-thirds Senate majority vote.

While the president does not vote on Senate legislation, the executive committee — consisting of four elected members — does vote. The amendments revoke this power but give the executive committee the power to set Senate agendas, a power previously reserved solely for the president. Under the amendments, the president would be able to break a tie within the Senate.

Some of the amendments check the power of the president, while others give new powers. SA Parliamentarian Trevor Tobey said that the amendments give more power to Senate voting members, while also allowing for greater collaboration between the executive committee and the legislature.

“We want there to be equitable representation from every residential college in the Senate, and that can’t happen when the executive committee is also voting,” Tobey said during the Senate meeting. “But we also empower the executive committee with the check on legislature with the veto power.”

Amendment number 2 also revises the impeachment process. The outcome of the initial process was bound by the decision of the University Court, while the proposed amendments require an additional two-thirds majority of Senate voting members to remove the accused if found to have committed an impeachable offense by the UCourt. Under the bylaws, blanket tax organizations’s leaders could be impeached. The amendment proposes that they be subject to the same impeachment process a member of the executive committee would undergo.

The proposed amendments also overhaul the blanket tax system. The proposed blanket tax committee removes two officers of blanket tax organizations from the committee, replacing them with three student association senators, alongside the unchanged three student association members not holding leadership roles in blanket tax organizations. Instead of reviewing blanket tax proposals biennially, the amendment changes the review to an annual basis.

The changes, according to Tobey, eliminate any potential for a conflict of interest in the allocation of blanket tax funds. 

“The idea behind getting rid of the blanket tax leaders on the committee is that it creates a clear conflict of interest when blanket tax leaders are making decisions on the committee, and obviously they don’t vote on their individual budgets, they recuse themselves, however, there’s a clear incentive for someone with whatever organization is, or at least the appearance of self interest there,” Tobey said.

The SA is funded by the blanket tax, but Tobey said that since Senate members are elected to their positions, and are part of a deliberative body, they would not have the same conflict of interest that blanket tax organization leaders could potentially have. The proposed amendment gives the Senate “ultimate authority” over the SA budget, the blanket tax and blanket tax organizations.

“The idea there is that the Student Association Senate has the final say on the finances and the budgets of allocating the blanket tax that we collect and give to blanket tax organizations,” Tobey said.

Another change in the proposed amendments would only allow elected senators to propose legislation to the SA, rather than any student association members, which currently include all undergraduate students. Tobey said the idea behind that change was not to disenfranchise members of the SA, but rather to limit potential legislation to items that at least one voting Senate member approves of.

One of the reasons for proposing the amendments, Tobey said, was to prevent UCourt investigations into the actions of the SA.

“After the UCourt case that overturned the newer constitution, there’s a lot of internal contradictions within not only the Constitution, but with the bylaws in the Constitution, and that makes it nearly impossible to govern other rules,” Tobey said. “We want clarity.”

Last year, a proposed amendment on the spring ballot was overturned after UCourt ruled that it was improperly represented on the ballot. Before that, UCourt ruled that a similar constitutional amendment was not ratified properly, not having achieved a 20% voter turnout, already after the SA had declared the amendment ratification successful.

“We want to be able to equitably apply the rules and procedures in the Constitution,” Tobey said. “That’s not possible when there’s in turn contradictions and problems with our processes and systems.”

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