By Dylan Hart
For weeks, controversy had simmered around Student Government.
It approved a budget for 2019-2020 that increased its own allocation by 19 percent while slashing the money for other campus organizations.
Its president threatened to cut off all funding for The Crow’s Nest in a short timeframe.
And while senators engaged in a battle over a proposal to create a new senate position, a member of the supreme court resigned with a stinging rebuke of Student Government.
“Eventually,” she wrote. “SG becomes toxic to everyone that is in it.”
The simmering controversy exploded into chaos last week in a circus of tweets attacking coworkers, a short-lived attempt to impeach the entire supreme court and a packed meeting where the spectators included the regional vice chancellor of student affairs and the dean of students.
And tensions continue to rise.
Now, six members of SG are facing impeachment, including Student Body Vice President Ysatis Jordan.
“Everything that you all do today – all of the decisions — have strong impact and will resonate throughout the rest of the term and through terms long past us,” SG advisor Dwayne Isaacs told the senate.
While many of the impeachments center around an April 8 general assembly meeting and the subsequent supreme court trial, Jordan is facing impeachment partially because of two tweets she posted attacking coworkers in SG.
On April 10, she tweeted: “Waiting for two gay males to call my boss crying about something that doesn’t even concern them. I’m taking bets on how long you think it will take.”
The tweet came after the failure of a bill drafted by senators Naya Payne and Gregory Cote. The bill proposed the creation of a new position, secretary of the senate, to increase transparency and outreach between SG and the student body.
On April 15, Jordan tweeted: “Heard this girl named Mya Horak is obsessed with me. Apparently she can’t stop talking about me on Twitter on Tumblr I hope someone lets her know I’m engaged.”
Horak is an associate justice in the SG judicial branch.
And while Jordan did not publicly apologize, she continued to post on Twitter after facing backlash from students on Facebook when a Crow’s Nest reporter posted screenshots of her tweets to the Facebook group, “USFSP The Know It All’s Guide to Knowing it All!”
She tweeted, “If I use the word hotdog in a sentence does that mean I’m anti-hotdog? Lmk (Let me know).”
Jordan earns $8,325 a year from student-funded Activities & Service fees. Her successor’s salary remains untouched.
A gathering storm
On April 16, Student Body President Daniel “Kaeden” Kelso sent out a mass email calling for a special senate meeting set for April 18.
While the meeting’s purpose was initially unclear, senators and reporters for The Crow’s Nest soon learned that three senators had called for the impeachment of five justices in the judicial branch, and the meeting would be to hear the impeachment proceedings.
Payne had previously accused senate president Tiffany Porcelli of “abusing her power” to “undermine his bid to become the next Senate President,” and requested a trial in the supreme court against Porcelli and senate president pro tempore Hannah Rose Wanless.
While the April 10 trial did not come to a conclusion, Payne dropped it after Porcelli apologized to the senate. However, accusations still flew — aimed at the justices who presided over the trial.
Senator Trevor Martindale sponsored five “memos of impeachment” against Chief Justice Nisuka Williams, Senior Justice Samantha Fiore, and Associate Justices Hannah Murphy, Mya Horak and Jonathan Guerrier. The memorandums were co-sponsored by senators Veronica Jimenez and Zoe Dukas.
The memos accused the five justices of mishandling Payne’s trial in several ways. They said that the justices had acted unethically and unfairly, breaching protocol in the trial.
But the night before the special meeting, Payne posted his own memorandum of impeachment on the “USFSP The Know It All’s Guide to Knowing It All!” — a discussion group for USF St. Petersburg students and alumni. He also submitted the impeachment to the senate.
The impeachment was aimed at Martindale, Jimenez and Dukas, as well as Porcelli, Jordan and Chief Legal Officer Thomas Ryan. The memorandum was co-sponsored by senators Chase Cooley and Joseph Sook.
Payne’s Facebook post said that those named in the memorandum were “trying to impeach and remove the entire Supreme Court because of personal and petty reasons.” Payne added that he was “trying to stop them,” and that he was also “trying to put these people in check and stop the corruption, unprofessionalism and abuses of power.”
In the memorandum, Payne wrote that “it is with great sadness, disappointment, but honorable duty that I draft this memorandum of impeachment. I do not take matters of impeachment lightly, nor did I ever imagine or wish to ever have to do this, but I do this because I must.”
Payne accused Martindale, Dukas and Jimenez of attempting to impeach the judicial branch “out of personal reasons and out of hatred.” He accused the other three of conspiring with the senators to impeach the judicial branch.
Jordan was accused of malfeasance for “use of homophobic and bigoted language to attack Senators and Justices publicly on social media.”
Additionally, Payne accused Jordan of abusing her power by filing “excessive notices of non-compliance” against senator Tyra Warren and former senator Gregory Cote.
Ryan was accused of abusing his power by using his position in a “Quasi-Judicial manner to lie before the Senate and claim a bill he personally opposed was ‘unconstitutional,’” as well as two other abuses of power and one count each of misfeasance, nonfeasance and incompetence.
The bill Payne refers to in the memorandum is an April 8 senate bill sponsored by Payne to establish a new “Secretary of the Senate” position, which received no votes and died at an April 8 general assembly meeting.
In a discussion before the vote, Ryan mentioned that the bill would not be able to pass into law, even if the senate voted to pass it, because it violated the SG constitution.
Porcelli was accused of shutting down discussion and “intentionally confusing and lying in front of the Senate …by failing an Objection motion by stating it needed to be seconded,” in reference to the same bill discussion.
The same night, Dukas retracted her co-sponsorship of the original impeachment memorandums.
“Please disregard my signature in Sponsoring of the Impeachment of the Supreme Court,” Dukas wrote in an email April 17 to all members of SG. “I do not want to partake in it and misunderstood what I was signing up for.”
Because of her withdrawal, the memorandums would not be able to stand; they needed a sponsor and two co-sponsors to be brought to the senate floor.
‘Everyone is watching’
At the special assembly, Payne said that even though the judicial branch would no longer be impeached, he would continue to submit his impeachment of the six SG members mentioned in his memorandum.
“There’s a difference between making mistakes and deliberate actions and deliberate words,” Payne said at the assembly. “I haven’t been reached out to, and nobody in a public forum has apologized for what they’ve said.”
Since most senators were either sponsors of or targeted by the impeachment, only four senators were eligible: Joe Morales, Alexandria “Lexi” Bishop, Ariel Duhart and Katherine Fishman.
Morales was elected chair of the impeachment committee, while Bishop and Duhart were elected as the other two members.
While the senate was focused on the impeachment, faculty were fixated on the impact of social media – although unwilling to name names, they were all focused on Jordan’s posts.
“People mess up,” said Patti Helton, regional vice chancellor of student affairs. “When you’re a leader, it’s a bigger mess-up because people are watching you. If you think nobody’s watching you, they are. It’s a sign of a leader to acknowledge when you make a mistake and have to apologize or ask for forgiveness.”
The committee will now review the impeachments and present its findings to the senate at general assembly. After being voted on by the senate, the impeachments will go to the SG supreme court for a final decision — the same supreme court that was going to be impeached.
There is only one general assembly meeting left for the term, and no guarantee that the committee will be able to complete its goal in time.
Additionally, Jordan and Porcelli are graduating at the end of the semester — making their potential impeachment more symbolic than realistic.
To close the special assembly, Porcelli quoted the poet Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
