More articles of impeachment threatened
The ASLCC Senate meeting on Nov. 8 followed the tumultuous tone of the meeting the previous day, during which a Senator speaking on the promise of anonymity threatened impeachment proceedings against ASLCC President Keely Blyleven.
The open-to-the-public meeting began with a bang, eventually leading to the gallery being temporarily forced out for an emergency work session motioned by Hannah Lyon, who was recently ratified unanimously as a senator during the previous meeting.
The meeting began with an opening statement by acting Vice President Nick Keough. Promptly following this, “Diego Wilson and Keough started arguing,” Tegan Epperly, President of the Gender & Sexuality Alliance, said.
“Lyon and Wilson tried to interrupt Keough and Keough responded, ‘No, overruled. I’m going to continue my statement,’ referring to the last meeting and how he feels that Wilson shouldn’t be on the Senate [since] he’s not ratified.”
It was half an hour before the agenda for the meeting got ratified.
Following more back and forth between Wilson and Keough, Lyon called for an emergency work session. The gallery forced to vacate the ASLCC meeting place for about half an hour.
After the meeting resumed, Epperly made a statement from the gallery.
“As a GSA [Gender and Sexuality Alliance] President, I don’t feel safe on this campus, speaking for students who couldn’t be here, they don’t feel safe, speaking as someone who wants to be on student government, but with you [Wilson] being on student government, I don’t want to be on it, I don’t feel safe with that, and I don’t know how you got the position with being the person you are not even having the human decency to respect someone else and respect what they want to be called. You speak in such a condescending way, it’s not okay.”
ASLCC Senator Caleb Peterson admitted that “last night was most certainly a mess, I am embarrassed and apologize to anyone who witnessed the behaviors demonstrated.”
Epperly, reflecting on the future of the student government, said that she doesn’t see Wilson being impeached and doesn’t “see student government doing very well this year on top of everything else that’s going on at LCC.”
On the other hand, Peterson said, “I’m sure it was not even noticed between all the arguing of our last Senate meeting, but we actually formed a committee to review and fix our constitution and bylaws, it will be lead by our Chief of Staff [Shana Santry-Weiland], who I think is a very thorough individual, and an excellent choice to run the committee.” The fixing, Peterson continued, is imperative because “what you are seeing is the result of our constitution being changed without a lawyer to look over it and make sure it actually makes sense. Our bylaws and constitution are from different years and crafted by different administrations, so they don’t line up too well.”
Moving forward, Peterson says that he is “in the process of developing a unity agreement, if the Senate votes to pass it then we will have a public signing of the document.” His hope is that the document will “better outline how we can work together and become more efficient as a small government.”
