Thursday, November 16, 2006
Impeachment: The LOOOOONG Version
So, a blog post covering 7.5 hours of Senate antics. Strap yourselves in.
We begin by thanking Vishal Gupta for letting Anil Daryani chair the hearing and subsequent deliberations (which were kept open). I think Daryani did a good job.
The Sonya Banerjee approach was not the one I would have taken. I would have avoided the technical issues and just punched the major points. Banerjee used what turned out to be a far funnier strategy. She ripped the case to pieces on JRPs. Essentially, she would quote JRP after JRP as the plaintiffs, Donald Rizzo and Brandon Chen, stood around going "durrr durrrrrr." I should note that the Student Action folks admitted afterwards that the plaintiffs stood around going "durrr durrrrrr," arguing that since Senators are incompetent, the hearing was unfair because the defense was far more effective. Apparently, a fair hearing would have given Sonya a handicap of some sort so she wouldn't defend herself as effectively.
I'll note, by the way, that at no time did Student Action approach folks who did know what the fuck they were doing to run their case for them. For instance, I would've been cool with it, just as I would've been happy to mount an effective appeal in the Ratto v. Vakil appeal. (You can be damn sure my brief would've mentioned double jeopardy, and I wouldn't have charged 22,000 fucking dollars for it)
In pre-trial arguments, it turns out that the evidence that the plaintiffs were supposed to submit four days before the hearing was actually submitted four hours before the hearing. Good job, guys! The evidence was suppressed.
The stuff about the recording was dismissed, since Sonya wasn't chair at the time.
It was about this time that Rizzo and Chen realized they were in way over their head, and had no idea what they were doing. How DARE Sonya mount a defense. So they tried to get the entire case rescheduled so they could actually prepare. This was so blatantly unconstitutional that it got shot down, but it really showed how pathetic these charges were.
Rizzo argued that the appeal reversal served as an "admission of guilt," which was funny, because none of the "admissions" in the appeal reversal actually lined up with the charges against Sonya.
Blah blah stuff stuff. I won't get into the detail of the arguments. They aren't that funny. For instance, the plaintiffs say the Judicial Council denied Bret Manley the opportunity to nominate another spokesperson in Ratto v. Vakil, but actually he never made the motion when nominating speakers, and just tried to do it when it came up. Blah.
Suken Vakil was allowed to speak, since he was only found to be a liar in front of the Judicial Council, not the Senate. He then lied. Shocking!
He lied that he was asked about chalk as a campaign tool. He lied that he said he couldn't answer the question clearly. In fact, he was given the opportunity to explain himself when he said chalk lasts for one day. He was asked why it was still out there at the time, and he said "I don't know."
He claimed to remember word for word what was said in that >2 hour meeting. He identified by name the justices who asked him the question about chalk. But then, when asked to name the justices in the room (and most of them were there), he said he didn't know their names. He also forgot Bobby Gregg was there. He then said that he didn't really remember it word-for-word, only "pretty much" word-for-word. Great.
When Sonya was giving her case, nobody was really listening. The senators weren't paying much attention, which makes sense, since votes were probably predetermined, though Sonya certainly gave Ali the opportunity to vote against it.
Vivienne Nguyen asked Emilie Saleh if Sonya's questions for her in Ratto v. Vakil made her cry. This was where a bunch of discussion about whether Sonya badgered witnesses began. That discussion ended when Taylor Allbright pointed out in deliberations the minor detail that badgering was never charged.
Sonya asked DAAP Senator and charger Dimitri Garcia questions which had little to do with the case, really. Sonya convinced Anil to allow her to ask those questions based on her sixth amendment rights to face her accuser. I disagree, but whatever. It allowed some fun.
Dimitri was asked about some details. Here are the things he didn't know:
When the deadlines for witness/evidence lists and briefs were.
When Banerjee was appointed chair.
Who the other people who filed the charge sheet with him were.
Rizzo later asked him if he felt Sonya was engaging in character assassination, and he said yes, but he was wrong. Dimitri assassinated his own character by admitting he had no fucking clue what he was talking about when he filed these charges. It was a cheap shot, but it was a funny one.
As the trial winded down, Student Action folks started pointing out that they weren't lawyers, and they weren't all that familiar with the JRPs, and that the hearing wasn't really fair because Sonya knew her stuff, and Student Action didn't know jack. The "defense from incompetence" is one we've come to expect from Student Action.
"Mr. Chen, I would ask that you please articulate yourself better so we can understand what you're saying." -Anil Daryani.
"Regardless of our inarticulateness..." -Donald Rizzo
Impressive, though, was the suggestion that, despite the Senate's incompetence in reading the JRPs, their interpretation should be valued over the Judicial Council's. Those are tough arguments to make together.
Ali said he was convinced to oppose the removal because, regardless of SA's incompetence, in order to give a fair trial, the Senate couldn't compensate for Rizzo and Chen's impotence.
Vivienne Nguyen said that Kris Cuaresma-Primm was removed from office because he was arrested. I certainly don't recall this, and neither did Taylor or David Wasserman.
She ended with some boasting about how the Senate was doing "double duty" by paying attention to the JRPs as well. She went further to say that the Senate was doing far more than the Judicial Council in this regard, as if the Judicial Council never has to familiarize itself with the ASUC bylaws. Of course, in reality, the Judicial Council often gets stuck with the task of digging through poorly written bylaws to come up with decisions, while the Senate can simply vote on impeachment without giving any reasons whatsoever. And since a bunch of other speakers had just stood up to explain that Senators didn't know anything about the JRPs, the boast seemed a bit empty. But don't tell Vivienne that.
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