2. The GUSA President is elected class-wide. Regularly between 40-50% of campus turns out to vote in these elections. GUSA Presidents run campaigns on issues that are relevant to the Senate, such as SAC reform. They enter into office before the student activities fee budget is organized. Calen last year was overwhelmingly elected on his platform of funding board reform, opposite the anti-reform ideas of others. If the Senate elections were unclear on a mandate, the Presidential elections could not have been clearer.

3. Bill making 101. For any substantive bill by the Senate (i.e., not a resolution), it must pass a majority vote of the Senate and then must get the signature of the President. So even if one Senator was elected on a handful of votes (and the majority were not), he or she would need to convince at a minimum half the Senate and the President, who was elected by all students–or two/thirds to override the President’s veto. For votes allocating the SAF, it needs 2/3rds votes of the Senate plus Presidential approval. The idea that a bill radically going against the wishes of majority opinion at Georgetown going through is fiction.

4. It’s a little hypocritical to have the Voice ed-board criticizing GUSA’s legitimacy, saying it isn’t speaking for the students. Here we have a Board comprised of 7 people, all who work on the Voice themselves, who deliberate and vote in secret. They are selected from within the newspaper. It’s 6 white people and a South Asian, and if I had to guess on the political make-up of the Board . . . let’s just say I doubt you’d find any ‘Georgetown Academy’ writers among them. Yet they have the power to editorialize as ‘The Voice’, one of the largest and most influential papers on campus, read by administrators and students alike. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone . . .