A Constitutional Conundrum

Right now the ASUCD is involved in a "constitutional crisis" over the events of last fall's Senate elections. The entire scandal is on the Davis Wiki, but it's almost impossible to figure out what happened because the article is written like a blog. In case you don't want to spend two days figuring out what happened, let me spare you the trouble:

*6 people were elected to be Senators last fall, but 3 of them were under investigation by Student Judicial Affairs (the academic integrity people). 1 case was eventually dismissed, but the other 2 were placed on probation for having low GPA's. Regardless, the candidates ran and won the election even though you're not supposed to run if your GPA is too low, and the candidates lied about their qualifications to run.
*The Senate tried to determine a solution to the problem, but came up with nothing. Instead of suspending the Senate bylaws and letting the candidates take their seats, they chose to let the Courts decide if the candidates were qualified.
*The Court heard the case, but they had a problem: there weren't enough justices in the room to be considered a qourum, so by ASUCD bylaws their ruling would be null. They chose to hear the case and rule anyways, but their decision was placed in an envelope that could have been thrown out if the Senate felt the ruling was invalid.
*The Senate threw out the envelope, and behind closed door wrote a new law that retroactively eliminated the bylaw that made the candidates ineligible. So they completely threw out the one bylaw that got in the way.

The crisis is that the Senate allowed ineligible people to take their seats by removing the law that made them ineligible. By making this a retroactive change, then every candidate who ever ran for ASUCD Senate and was declared ineligible is now eligible and should have been allowed to run. Thus they fixed the problem with the Constitution by creating new ones. Rather than take sides in the debate, I've decided to debut the newest feature of this LJ: "Why You Fail".

1. The Senate and the Court spent the first 90% of this problem by debating whether or not their decisions would be considered legitimate. I have no confidence in a government that spends most of its time debating whether or not it is actually fit to make decisions. Also, this is not Battlestar Fucking Galactica, where the last remaining members of the government are a schoolteacher and lunatic computer scientist. You don't have a quorum because people were allowed to leave the court when they were still need, and not because most of your government was nuked.

2. The whole crisis boiled down to a line of law that said "Person X may not run if they have a low GPA". These candidates ran anyways, and lied about their qualifications. Most of the time, these people would have been declared invalid, and qualified alternates would be selected. By removing the law that got in the way, you have said "it's better to lie and then change the system than stick to the letter of the law". It's also sad that the Metallica FanClub does a better job of enforcing integrity than a student government, because I pay $45 for a chance to buy a special CD/DVD, and I pay $4000 to buy plasma TV's for a new TV studio.

3. A representative government is one where the people choose advocates to speak/vote on their behalf and then take a back seat to the political process. True democracy has everyone standing on a hill voting on everything from laws to resolutions. You cannot claim that letting the invalid candidates sit is promoting democracy. The people chose the best candidates in front of them, and saying 2 of them were not supposed to be there but were elected anyways says the government decides who sits, not the people.

4. It's one thing for political parties to criticize each other for using similar dirty tactics. I'm OK with Republicans saying Democrats abuse the filibuster, because I know the Republicans were accused of the same thing 8 years ago. The same with trying to impeach the sitting President on minor charges: you know they're just acting like kids who throw rocks at each other and then cry that the other one was the bad guy. Reading laws from the same document in many ways (strict: elected candidates are elected, broad: the Senate can nullify decisions by a court that may or may not be valid), and then removing laws that are inconvenient is playing favorites.

ASUCD Senate, the above reasons are Why You Fail. I'm agreeing with this guy's closing remarks: you had a million ways to fix this problem, the simplest being "holding elections for alternate senators", the more complex being "allowing the Court to rule and considering it legitimate", but you chose the worst one. I already have to tolerate one ineffectual Senate, and I have no desire to put up with one more.