Intriguing Developments
So awhile ago I had created a facebook group dedicated to the game of Assassins. Nearly a year later there were still only six members in it because I never got around to promoting it and in the dark days before the Facebook Newsfeed things tended to go unnoticed on Facebook unless you put effort into them.
Well this morning I finally got around to sending facebook invites to a number of my friends. Some 12 hours later, 9 more of my friends have joined, and due to their joining being echoed on their friends' newsfeeds, 13 more people joined bringing membership up to 28.
I think I'll declare an actual physical meeting for next week. I will do this declaring tomorrow.
(And yes, for those who don't remember (& the 95% of you who weren't around back then) thats ASUCD Senator Jon Avidor & then-President Tiqula Bledsoe in the picture to the left here.)
Seceding from the Union
In a special operation today Emosnail agents obtained photographs of a draft bill that would remove ASUCD from the UC umbrella organization UCSA. In addition to the picture at right, a close up where the writing is more legible can be found here.
Judicial Adventures
I thought I'd highlight what we actually do on the ASUCD Supreme Court by posting a general summary of the last two meetings.
Last week Internal Affairs Commissioner Max Mikalonis joined us to discuss a bill that would change the selection process for the Chief Justice. All six court members were present (we have three vacant seats currently).
Before we got to discussing that though we discussed my plan that since this will be my last quarter I want to give everyone as much practice in a presiding role / chance to show off how well they do it, so we're going to have several Vice Chief Justices throughout this quarter. The justices all approved this plan and last quarter's Vice Chief Joe Harney volunteered to continue into the first two week section and was accepted unopposed.
I'm pretty sure when we'd worked on the bill that changed appointment to the Court from presidential nomination to committee nomination we'd intended to change the Chief Justiceship as well, but one way or another it hadn't been changed. In fact, as written it didn't even say the President's nominee had to be confirmed by Senate! So its pretty much universally seen that this needs to be changed, and in time to go on the ballot this quarter so its in effect when I resign at the end of the quarter.
The question of whether to have it as the President's appointment or an interviewing committee consisting of the President, Internal Affiars Commission (IAC) Chairman, Elections Cmmte Chairman and two senators was discussed. I pointed out that since the Senate has never not confirmed a nominee for any position, that check on the President's nominee is essentially a joke. In order to have a serious process to select the person they might be stuck with for the next four years they should have a committee. We ended up recommending the committee by a 5-1 vote, with Justice Harney prefering the presidency and saying at the very least he'd rather see the committee consist of the president and six senators.
Next it was discussed whether to build into the framework some way to compell the president to make the appointment in a timely manner or else (or else what being the matter under discussion). IAC had been bouncing around the idea of having the Vice Chief Justice become the Chief Justice (at least temporarily?) if the president does not appoint someone in a timely manner. But we all opposed this primarily on the grounds that we elect our Vice Chief and we would not want to be choosing our own Chief Justice. That would be a violation of seperation of powers basically. Yes we guard against undue power in our own hands just as much as anyone elses.
Also, by definition the Vice Chief does preside in the absense of the Chief Justice so it would be kind of redundant to encode that further. And while I'm talking about the Vice Chief I'd like to note that I'm aware they should probably be the Presiding Justice Pro Tempore, but hey we like Vice Chief and it is well within our discretion.
Anyway we couldn't think of anything so by a 6-0 vote we did not recommend any particular institutional mechanism to compel the President to make a timely appointment. Also I pointed out that for example right now I'm pretty sure three justices are secretly plotting to slit eachother's throats over the position, and I myself ascended through the blood of my predecessor, so there'll be no shortage of pressure on the President to make the appointment. Then, there was an awkward silence. (=
This Week Vice Chief Joe Harney was unable to be present so senior justice Tim Coady presided. We primarily discussed the first case of several that would make up the current scandal at Berkeley -- ASUC vs. Student Action Executive Slate. Basically it regarded whether or not chalking done before voting started that remained near polling locations on election day despite the Elections Chair having advised all candidates they needed to remove the chalkings could be considered "active and knowing campaigning."
So first I read them the relevant ASUC Berkeley bylaws and the evidence, and we discussed it. Then I read them the most relevant quotations from the plaintiff / defendant arguments (I particularly liked "[Defendant] Mr. Vakil states that “the act of chalking, which is the action of campaigning via chalking (the transfer of potential energy into kinetic energy with the intent of garnering votes) occurs at the time the chalk is transferred to the pavement.") and we discussed it further. Then I read the largest concurring opinion (basically the Berkeley Opinion consisted of a short general part they all agreed on, and then every justice was part of a different concurring opinion) and we discussed our thoughts on their findings. As the whole thing was rather complicated (as evidenced by the disagreement among the ASUC Berkeley justices) we didn't vote on a final conclusion.
Altogether I think we all found the exercise very useful and look forward, time permitting, to going over previous cases of our own or other such things in the future.