After five weeks of heated debate and prolonged discussion, a referendum to replace the Student Government constitution was withdrawn at the final meeting of this year’s student senate session.
Student Body President-elect Lindsay Richardson, the bill’s primary sponsor, motioned to withdraw the legislation after nearly two hours of debate Wednesday.
Richardson said she made the decision to withdraw the referendum for a few reasons, including the amount of work the constitution still needed.
“There’s still a lot to be done with it,” she said. “Knowing that there are still some changes that need to be made, I did not want to put up three referendums for the constitution. I’d rather just do one for the student body.”
Sen. Kirkland Gray offered five amendments to the bill at the start of the meeting. Those amendments were eventually split into ten and were voted upon separately; almost all of them failed.
Richardson called each of the amendments hostile, saying she wanted to encourage debate on each one.
Gray’s amendments would have made first-year students eligible to become speaker of the senate, allowed the vice president to preside over the senate until a speaker was elected and increased the number of senators to 51 to account for the speaker, among other things.
Gray tried to keep the legislation in play by objecting the withdrawal motion, but he was rejected, and as the primary sponsor, Richardson was able to withdraw it without a vote.
Gray said pulling the bill at the end of the session defeated the purpose of discussing several other pieces of legislation that were presented toward the end of the session.
“I wish we would have looked at more small improvements for things we could advocate for, instead of paying so much attention to this if we were just going to withdraw it in the end,” he said.
But in the end, Gray said pulling the bill was the best decision, considering the circumstances the senate faced at the end of the session.
“We should have seen it through the end, and that’s not really something we did, but it was a smart move by the end when it started to fall apart,” he said.
And although the final session fizzled out in terms of legislative progress, Richardson reminded senators of the progress they made during their time. During the 2013-14 term, the senate passed 40 pieces of legislation and several resolutions, updated the finance codes and revamped the SG codes to create seven chapters of updated codes.
“What was achieved tonight was (a) more solid foundation,” Richardson said in an email after the meeting, referring to the decision to defer the issue to the next senate. “Hopefully, it will at least serve as a guiding light to help them navigate through what we as (a) senate struggled with.”