Northwestern’s Associated Student Government passed two constitutional amendments as emergency legislation and swore in new committee members during its meeting this Wednesday.
The session began with elections for the Rules Committee and Student Activities Committee.
Then, SESP sophomore and ASG Parliamentarian JJ Nabors-Moore presented two constitutional amendments.
The first amendment revised ASG’s constitution to reflect updated Student Organizations & Activities guidelines. The new policies impose stricter Senate eligibility rules, formal advisor requirements and more detailed financial controls. It also expanded non-discrimination and anti-hazing compliance mechanisms.
Nabors-Moore said passing the amendment as emergency legislation was necessary to prevent the vote from being delayed two weeks, which would be after the school’s Oct. 15 deadline to implement the SOA reforms. The Senate voted to classify the proposal as emergency legislation and then approved it overwhelmingly.
“All the clubs on campus had to update their constitutions to match Northwestern’s legal code,” Weinberg senior and Speaker of the Senate Kaitlyn Salgado-Alvarez said. “That’s just for Northwestern to officially recognize us as a student organization.”
The second amendment allowed the ASG to fill empty Senate seats in a school’s constituency without calling a snap election if that institution has fewer candidates than the number of open seats.
The proposal was designed to allow ASG to quickly fill the two vacant seats in the McCormick School of Engineering and the School of Communication constituencies, Nabors-Moore said.
This amendment allows the parliamentary body — comprising ASG’s two whips, the speaker of the Senate, the deputy speaker of the Senate and the parliamentarian — to unilaterally fill empty seats with any candidate who collects 35 signatures from their respective school.
The amendment was successfully classified as emergency legislation and approved by the Senate.
McCormick frequently does not fill its quota of senators, Salgado-Alvarez said. She believes its students tend to get more involved in engineering-related extracurriculars than student government.
“Generally, it is McCormick that doesn’t have enough people running, and this is a way that we can fix this,” McCormick senior and ASG Co-President James La Fayette Jr. said to the Senate.
Nabors-Moore said this new system is less redundant than holding a snap election because anyone interested in the position likely would have already run during the regular election. Passing the amendment as emergency legislation allows the seats to be filled faster, he said.
Nabors-Moore also said this meeting set a good tone for ASG’s work this year.
“The fact that these two amendments were passed so quickly, and the fact that we are already passing legislation sets a good omen for the next year of the Senate,” Nabors-Moore said. “I think we’re going to be incredibly productive, we’re gonna produce a lot of great changes for the University and I’m really excited to see all the new faces.”
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