Sen. Kristine Jensen casts deciding vote for USSA request

Sen. Kristine Jensen provided the deciding vote this evening in favor of the ASUO Executive’s $2,000 request to send two extra students to the United States Student Association’s 62nd National Student Congress.

The request passed 3 votes to 2. (Sens. Ryan Lassi and Nick Schultz were not present. Sen. Jessica Jones has resigned from Summer Senate because she will not be able to make most meetings and did not want to count against the body’s quorum.)

Jensen, who was elected with the Students First slate, did not ask any questions or state any opinions about the request before voting. Students First vice presidential candidate Nick Gower made clear before the vote that he opposed the request, as did conservative Sen. Demic Tipitino.

“I definitely respect what they both have to say,” Jensen said of Gower and Tipitino. “But ultimately (surplus funds are) for experiences students wouldn’t have otherwise, and that’s what this is.”

The conventional wisdom in the ASUO is that slates don’t always hold after the election, and Gower and Students First campaign manager Andrew Crampton have expressed some uncertainty in the past of how Jensen would eventually vote on Senate.

Schultz, who ran as the more progressive True Blue Student Coalition‘s presidential candidate, said he would vote against the request but then had to leave the meeting before the vote was called.

Schultz said the conference was a “wonderful opportunity” to educate executive staff about legislative lobbying, but could also provide an opportunity for students who had not received such training before. He questioned why the executive would send students who have gone to Congress “multiple times.”

“What are they going to bring back after going a second or third time?” he asked. President Emma Kallaway said in an interview last week that one of the students she would like to send with surplus funds was ASUO Legislative Affairs Coordinator Rachel Cushman, who during the spring election called Schultz out for not having any lobbying experience.

Seems like the height (or depth) of sour grapes.

Fellow True Blue Senators Jeremy Blanchard and Zachary Stark-Macmillan both voted in favor of the request, though Blanchard said during debate that he wasn’t sure he would. Stark later said he would have voted for it even if Schultz had been there to vote against it. “He would have voted nay for a completely different reason,” Stark said. Schultz was concerned with the people who were going, Stark said, while Stark was more concerned with how much money Senate would have left.

When Blanchard was asked if he would have voted for the request if Schultz had voted against it, he seemed far from certain he could have done so. Eventually, he said he’d “personally experienced the positive effect lobbying can have” and said he had attended the Power Shift conference on climate change.

Kallaway and VP Getachew Kassa came prepared with numbers from previous summers. Last year Summer Senate spent $2,100 on 4 student groups, she said. At the beginning of her and Kassa’s presentation Kallaway said she would be taking over as the ex-officio representative for the vote because she was not going on the trip.

It seemed to be a pretty clear indication that Kallaway was prepared to break a tie and vote for the request if necessary. If Schultz had stayed, she may have had to do just that.

UPDATE 7/7 10:45 p.m.: If you haven’t seen it by now, I wrote a column with a very different take on Sen. Schultz’s dissent.