Executive appoints former Sens. to hiring committee
An ASUO press release sent out two hours ago announced that ASUO Vice President Getachew Kassa has appointed two former student senators to the hiring committee for Constitution Court justices.
Kassa’s choices are Cassandra Gray and Tina Snodgrass, both of whom served on the 2008-9 Student Senate. The court appointments, of course, are an extremely delicate matter for the Kassa and President Emma Kallaway at the moment. Read more about that here.
I can’t promise a fuller story about this tomorrow, because I am currently on vacation (and I have been for the last week and a half) and have a plane to catch early tomorrow morning, but I will file as soon as I can.
If you’ll recall, Kallaway and Kassa declared they would appoint “one non-student and one student not currently serving in the ASUO Executive” to the committee to serve alongside Kassa. Gray, who completed her Masters in Business Administration last spring, is no longer a student.
Both of the appointed committee members ran against Kallaway in the 2008 election on the Oregon Action Team slate Sam Dotters-Katz rode to the presidency. Snodgrass was elected, while Dotters-Katz later appointed Gray.
Gray is very ideological, a bit of an old-school big-business, anti-spending conservative. She also has a reputation for being officious, particular about following the rules herself and emphatic when others don’t (you can see those traits in the op-ed piece she wrote for us in July). It will be interesting to see that kind of attitude applied to prospective hires.
Snodgrass, like Gray, cultivated a hard-working, professional reputation. Though she ran on a conservative slate, her decisions as a senator were often more pragmatic than ideological. The key moment for her was the hearing on OSPIRG’s budget, when, as an ACFC member, she was by far the most sympathetic to the group, arguing for a sharply reduced, rather than eliminated, budget for them.
She was listed as a “board member” for the chimerical Students First slate, on which some conservative leaders ran, but it’s never been exactly clear whether that means anything. (case in point: when I asked ASUO Legislative Affairs Coordinator Rachel Cushman what her duties were as a board member, back during the campaign, she responded with genuine surprise at the fact she was listed as such)
While both obviously have extensive connections in ASUO circles, neither has a reputation for harboring strong political loyalties within the ASUO — that is, they’re neither strong loyalists to former Senate President and rumored conservative powerbroker Athan Papailiou, nor to the student-union/United States Student Association faction known (in the Oregon Commentator anyway), as “Fight Club” (or to any of the other caucuses I know about).
The remaining member of the committee will be ASUO adviser Consuela Perez-Jefferis.
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