Veto 1 Student Government 0

UT President Bill Powers finally has the one student he can claim supports the admin's efforts to destroy the Cactus Cafe: Student Government President Liam O'Rourke, who has unilaterally effectively vetoed last week's Student Government Assembly resolution supporting the venue.

On Monday – coincidentally, his last full day in office – O'Rourke sent an email to the student government list serve, telling them that he would not be signing AR41 – the Cactus Cafe resolution – or AR44, relating to political signs on campus. In the email he wrote, "While I support many of the recommendations in this resolution, I will not sign AR41 because it makes reference to and concurs with other legislation that goes beyond what I believe is the spirit and intent of AR41." He went on to say that he believed that the administration would take account of the resolution anyway in their discussions of the venue's future (that's optimism for you.)

The timing means that the resolution is functionally dead. SG Communications Director Danielle Brown explained, "That resolution was voted on at the last meeting of the 2009-2010 student government assembly. The first meeting of the 2010-2001 assembly will be tonight, when the new members will be sworn in." The president normally has a week to sign a resolution and any veto can be overturned by a two-thirds vote. However, she added, "Since that was the last meeting, and no reps tried to call an out-of-schedule regular meeting before tonight, then it won't be eligible to be heard again."

"How convenient," said Hayley Gillespie, co-founder of Student Friends of the Cactus Cafe. As for O'Rourke's statement that the resolution needed more consideration, "That has no legitimacy," she said. "The resolution was passed by the student government assembly with no debate over the substance of it. If there needed to be more discussion on this, that could have happened during the debate. But there was no dissenting vote, so his argument is completely false."

The only real option to formally re-instate the policy position is to bring a new resolution before the new president (Gillespie said she is will be talking to the original authors about doing that.) As for O'Rourke's actions, she added, "It's too bad that he was not prepared to stand behind his assembly."