We believe Student Senate Speaker Ashley Martin broke state law Wednesday night. Amid widespread Senate in-fighting, Martin moved the weekly Student Senate meeting, normally open to the public, into private executive session without citing one of nine reasons allowed under Revised State Statute 42 to close an open meeting. She did not give a reason at the time of which exemption her decision fell under. She has since declined to offer any additional insight. The Daily Reveille contacted Martin three times Wednesday and Thursday by telephone and twice by e-mail, offering her space to write a 450-word guest column about this topic or any other topic she felt would help students better understand the Senate. She did not respond until 6 p.m. Thursday, when she declined the offer. While we do not think she closed the meeting with any malicious intent, her decision is indicative of a larger problem that is prevalent in the Student Senate – it’s sometimes acceptance that it is a public body, and it’s more often claim that it is a student organization. We think this is not only a severe problem plaguing an organization that touts itself as the voice of the student body, it is legally unfounded. In 1994, then-Attorney General Richard P. Ieyoub wrote a legal opinion determining that after “construing the Open Meetings Law liberally, as we are required to do, it is the opinion of this writer that the LSU Student Government is a public body for purposes of that law.” We do not see why this would be a problem for the Senate. Why should it be a problem for an elected governmental entity composed of students and which spends student funds to operate transparently? It seems to us that it would be in the Senate’s best interest to allow students to see every step of the legislative process, even those steps that show them in a negative light. The Senate seems to have forgotten what its role is on campus. It has lost the trust of students. It takes years to earn trust and only seconds to lose, especially when it takes action in a manner that can only be viewed as secretive and designed to keep them from being accountable. We ask the Student Senate, if you are not going to operate as a public body, what is your purpose at the University, and why do we need you as an advocate?
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