By CHRIS ROSS
In the first Council Paper, Lucas Croslow suggested that the role of the Cabinet member of The King’s Council is improperly defined as a “non-voting member.” He believes that the Council exists to “serve the interests of the houses,” but because the Cabinet members do not directly represent a house, they should be refashioned as “non-voting, non-member officers.”
I fully agree that the Council exists to serve the houses, but I also think it exists to serve the students as a whole. I agree, too, that we need to hammer out the specifics of how the society can dismiss cabinet members and whom cabinet members represent.
What confuses me is Lucas’ proposition for the cabinet.
Often, a deliberative body’s officers are selected from the membership itself. To have non-voting (the status quo), non-member (the proposed change) officers makes little sense. In fact, parliamentary order typically stipulates that officers have the full right to vote as members, because officers are members who take an additional responsibility. Thus, I can only assume that Lucas means that the cabinet members should be non-participatory agents of the Council.
Students designed the Council to be representative of the student body through the houses. That’s why our constitutional framers purposefully decided to bind the cabinet’s participation and make them non-voting members—a designation that gives the house presidents (and only house presidents) the explicit right to make decisions.
Cabinet members functions as members and officers, but their voting power is withheld to retain this ability to the Houses. In other words, they are full participants in debate, and they execute the orders of the Council. But they remain silent when it comes time to make decisions.
This, then, is the crux of the debate—how much should cabinet members contribute? When? And for whom?
The way I see it, there are three ways we can move forward. Since Lucas started the debate with the role of the Cabinet member, I will focus my proposals on their function within a meeting. The question before us is how gagged the cabinet members are to be during a meeting.
First, we could retain the status quo. In this situation, cabinet members are in a default position of the gag being off, and the presidents have no authority to change that. They can be full participants in debate whenever called upon by the Chair. This is problematic, however. Cabinet members have certain responsibilities, so they should be limited to debate upon those areas that most concern them.
Second, under Lucas’ proposal, we could amend our constitution to place the gag on cabinet members by default, with the presidents possessing the power to take it off as they see fit. This limits participation of the cabinet members, who may have valuable knowledge about a given proposal.
The Director of Finance, for instance, would have to be explicitly recognized by a vote of the Council in order to tell the body how a given event would change the bottom line of its budget. To me, this adds undue bureaucracy to the process.
Third, as I would propose, we could amend the by-laws to retain the gag-off default position while giving the presidents the authority to request that cabinet members refrain from speaking. This way, if the Director of Communications is out of order by suggesting how the presidents should decide an org budget item, they have recourse to stop him.
Those who need to deliberate need information to deliberate well. As house presidents, our deliberators already have full plates. The executive cabinet exists both to provide information on and to execute initiatives directed by the house presidents and instituted by the student body president.
In his paper, Lucas said, “If an event is to be held for the whole student body, it should be because the nine House presidents have decided it’s beneficial to their houses.”
Simply allowing the cabinet the opportunity to offer their experience and knowledge does not at all impinge on the authority of the House presidents to vote on what is beneficial to their houses. While a student body president should certainly try to draw out the opinions of the house presidents first, setting up bureaucratic roadblocks barring the Director of Student Events to speak on such a topic is unwise.
At King’s, we understand the political philosophy that serves as the bedrock of great governmental institutions. However, we also possess a keen understanding of certain aspects of governance—namely, the problems associated with bureaucracy. We would never advocate putting a state’s governor or the Secretary of State in the Senate.
House presidents serve both their house members and the entire student body. Since our leaders must thus be multi-faceted, let’s not add a layer of bureaucracy that will hinder their performance from being its best.
