For those of you who don’t know–yet still for some reason care*–about the shockingly boring** catfight currently underway at the ASUO, we at the Commentator are here to give you a quick rundown.

– As we reported earlier this month, Senator Ben Rudin called out Senator Ben Bowman for a lack of “viewpoint neutrality” in regard to the funding of OSPIRG. That escalated to the filing of an official grievance on February 3rd where Rudin recommended that “In light of the viewpoint discrimination exercised in the OSPIRG vote in ACFC on January 31, I am requesting that the Constitution Court declare that vote invalid, issue an injunction against including OSPIRG in the final budget approved by ACFC, and allow OSPIRG to appeal its request to Senate.”

– On the 9th, Bowman responded to the accusations by claiming that Rudin did not cite any ASUO laws or the Green Tape Notebook in filing the grievance, according to the ODE.

– On the 10th, Rudin revised the grievance. As part of his new claim, he referred to ASUO protocol which states that Senators must abide by federal and state law, and a decision by the Supreme Court stating that viewpoint neutrality must be employed in cases where mandatory student fees are concerned.

– Bowman subsequently stated that viewpoint neutrality wasn’t a factor in his decision, because he was specifically interested in the organization’s worth to students (editor’s note: none), rather than the ideological positions they hold.

That is the standing of the issue leading up to this week’s Senate meeting. Hopefully something a bit more interesting will happen soon, possibly involving hair-pulling.

(In the same timeframe, Rudin filed an unrelated grievance against Ben Eckstein for failure to fill Senate Seat 13 within 30 days. Rudin withdrew this grievance on the 13th.)

*The Commentator is well aware that no such individual exists; the only people who care about the workings of the ASUO are ASUO Senators, and campus publications.

**Seriously, not even any jello fights or mud wrestling.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2012 at 00:16 by Ashley and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.