Through Murky Waters: Taking care of business
SGA committee cleans out constitutional house
By Alex Sirney, senior writer
Posted on November 30, 2006

The Student Senate took care of some housekeeping Tuesday, clarifying and updating the constitution with nine bills amending it. These bills, while not exceptionally exciting, show that the SGA is ready to take care of business, starting with its own.

SGA has been looking into cleaning up the constitution since the beginning of the semester, when it formed an ad hoc committee to examine that austere document and patch up the loopholes left when, among other things, general senate elections were moved from the fall to the spring, according to committee member Stefanie DiDomenico.

This committee with its unenviable task produced results Tuesday, plugging holes like the one that left the senate without any house rules for the first two weeks of the semester. It also clarified some things that were already being done but had not yet been written into the constitution, parliamentarian Rob Roodhouse said. Roodhouse’s role as parliamentarian is partially to function as a constitutional guru of sorts, and he sits on the ad hoc committee.

The meeting did have its points that would have left a casual observer snoozing, but that doesn’t mean that valuable work wasn’t being done. While the senate may at times take a long, laborious route to get where it’s going, at this meeting it got to all the right places.

“Ten minutes of debate tonight can avoid problems down the road,” Senate Speaker Stephanie Genco (Sr.) said, understating drastically the “problems;” the one bill that didn’t pass, after lengthy debate, would have made it impossible for any potentially profitable event to be funded by the SGA from contingency. One other bill was withdrawn because of ambiguous wording, but otherwise the senate passed all the constitutional bills on the agenda.

This kind of efficiency, with reasonable debate and high productivity, shows that the SGA is looking forward. “The constitution is always a work in progress,” Roodhouse said. DiDomenico agreed, saying that because SGA is constantly evolving, so must the constitution evolve with it.

Hopefully, with internal affairs in order after this semester, the SGA will continue its evolution next semester with an increased focus on impacting the JMU community.

Alex Sirney is a senior anthropology and SMAD major.