OU SGA Impeachment Primer
While Brian Ted Jones, PC primarily represents clients in Oklahoma cannabis matters, the firm has also represented several clients in a number of impeachment or removal-related proceedings as part of its larger constitutional and election-law practice.
From representing the proponents of a grand-jury petition to remove Oklahoma County DA David Prater, to bringing a public-interest standing claim by a former state legislator in the state Supreme Court to remove Corporation Commissioner Todd Hiett, Brian is deeply familiar with the various special procedures for seeking removal of Oklahoma elected officials.
In 2019, Brian even advised a longtime Democratic party activist seeking to petition the DNC to support President Trump's first impeachment, gaining insight into both House and Senate impeachment procedures at the federal level.
And as a former college student body president himself, Brian was intrigued last night to learn from the OU Daily that the current Student Government Association President had been impeached by the SGA Undergraduate Congress, and must now face trial in the Graduate Student Senate.
The OU SGA Constitution mirrors federal impeachment procedures in most respects, and even calls for the Chief Justice of the SGA Superior Court to preside over presidential impeachments (like the federal rule requiring the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to preside over presidential impeachments). Removal is only authorized upon a 2/3 votes, and each House of the SGA Legislative Branch is given authority to make rules governing impeachment proceedings under Section 9 (3) of the Constitution.
However, the OU Graduate Senate does not appear to have any rules of procedure for impeachment trials (a search of the OU Graduate Student Senate Bylaws shows zero results for the terms "impeach" or "impeachment"), and that may be because no SGA president has ever been impeached before.
Still, with this unprecedented step by, the OU SGA will first have to reckon with what rules of procedure should be developed to adjudicate these impeachment charges, and then how the charges should be reviewed and adjudicated.
The charges themselves raise several important legal questions. One impeachment article, for instance, accused the SGA President of violating the Oklahoma Open Meetings Act, an important but technical and complex provision of the Oklahoma statutes.
How the OU Graduate Senate will handle these weightly questions while protecting the rights of both the Undergraduate Congress to make its case, and the SGA President to make his defense, remains to be seen. But this will certainly be educational for everyone involved.