Well, there you have it ladies and gentlemen, our student representatives doing what they do best.

Absolutely nothing.

Despite the fervor of the previous week, the Student Assembly dismissed the impeachment resolutions for Adam Amit and Lawrence Faulstich Monday. The impeachment of Elahd Bar-Shai went to a vote, which was shut down with a vote of 36 to one, with seven abstentions (see Page 1). According to our representatives, removing any of the student leaders would impede the progress of the SA as a whole.

But what progress, specifically? There’s a new guidebook and the VISION program, but exactly what has the SA achieved this year apart from making speeches and embarrassing us in front of the entire SUNY SA?

It’s pathetic that the Assembly, which is in charge of student groups, not to mention a huge amount of money, is so apathetic. This isn’t an issue that should have been allowed to be swept under the rug — it should have been dealt with properly, by people who cared about what is best for the school. Instead of spending the meeting sending text messages and checking Facebook statuses, representatives should have been taking action.

It’s time for the Assembly to grow a backbone, and actually do something. If the current members are unable to, they should be replaced with people who can. The problem is they simply chose not to do anything. Whether it was to speed the meeting along or to not “disrupt progress,” the fact that they didn’t care enough to take action is unconscionable.

Year after year, our elected officials and representatives screw up. We’ve had more sex scandals than the White House, racist remarks and physical altercations, but no one has received more than a slap on the wrist. How can we be surprised that the mistakes get progressively worse if these actions don’t have consequences and everyone is allowed to slide? There isn’t even a set method for punishing SA members, aside from censure and impeachment.

At the meeting, an Assembly rep equated our current situation with Obama arriving at a UN conference in a T-shirt and drinking a beer. The arrogance is astounding. Amit and co. are not indispensable to this school; they are replaceable, and we could easily find a way to function without their leadership, or lack thereof. If we continue to allow them to treat our school as a joke, the situation will only get worse.

Let’s weed them out while we still can, find competent leaders who will take their jobs seriously and have them work for the betterment of our school.

This is a message to both the Assembly and the student government: Start doing your jobs so that we can go back to covering issues that don’t involve your mess.

It’s no question that we deserve far better leaders than this.