College is often deemed practice for “the real world.”
Engineering students construct designs, English students compose short stories, chemistry students swirl solutions in beakers. We at The Daily Reveille publish articles to inform our campus, serve as a platform for discussion and hold our policymakers accountable, whether they hail from the state Capitol, the Board of Regents, the LSU System Office, the LSU administration or Student Government.
SG claims to function the same way that an actual government entity would – it has executive, legislative and judicial branches, the president can issue executive orders, the Senate uses parliamentary procedure and the University Court issues rulings, many of which spark controversy.
Members of SG often gripe about why people don’t take them seriously, why their voter turnout is so low and why people don’t appreciate their hard work. The UCourt’s most recent ruling answers that question.
After a few SG election code violations, the most prominent of which found Your LSU using the SG logo on a Facebook page, UCourt ruled that Your LSU could no longer campaign during the runoffs, held Monday and Tuesday.
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein,” ruled former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1943.
Injunctions, which mandate that some form of expression be halted, are exceedingly rare at the Supreme Court level.
But by forcing the Your LSU ticket to stop campaigning, the SG UCourt essentially issued an injunction that prevented them from expressing their right to free speech in a public arena. What damage could have come from Your LSU campaigning that would have been great enough to force them to stop doing so?
Would the ticket’s use of the SG logo inflict pain upon every member of the student body? Would it cause mass chaos and anarchy at the University?
Yes, the Your LSU ticket broke the rules. Its members deserve to be punished, but not to the extent of surpassing the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which weighs a bit heavier than the SG constitution.
If SG members want students to take them seriously, perhaps they should consider playing by the same rules as the politicians of the United States and ensuring the right to free speech is extended to every student on campus, whether or not they agree with the message or the way in which it’s delivered.
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