Anyone at Sunday evening’s Student Association Senate meeting caught a glimpse of the comical – and quite disturbing – way some senators seem to view themselves.

Even if you weren’t at the meeting, Senator Brittney Mottley was quoted in Monday’s Northern Star as claiming students unquestioningly trust the SA, offering quite impotent reasoning for her position.

“When students select us as senators, they trust we are already doing the right thing,” she said. “I think that if [corruption] was a problem, they wouldn’t vote for us in the first place. They wouldn’t vote for dishonest people.”

Mottley’s quote was in response to legislation that sought to police the SA by making senators regularly paid by student organizations ineligible to vote on funding for their own organizations.

Perhaps Ms. Mottley’s recollection of last fall’s senate election results is a bit fuzzy. Mottley received 124 votes in District 1, which represents Stevenson and Neptune residence halls and University Plaza.

Any student can vote on all districts, regardless of which district they live in.

NIU listed its 10th-day enrollment at 25,313 last fall. If you do the math, Mottley received support from just less than half a percent of the NIU student body. From the 758 students who did vote in the fall election, Mottley received support from 16 percent – hardly a mandate.

The bill was a good start, but all senators who are members of groups, not just the regularly paid members, should be ineligible to vote on funding for their own organizations.

The rationale for its rejection was that it wouldn’t be fair to students for senators to forfeit their votes.

Allow us to translate: It wouldn’t be fair to the senators’ organizations.

Another bill would have required all financial votes to be taken by roll-call, which would have supplied the student body with a record of how the senators they elected voted.

Again, the bill was a good start, but could have gone further. All votes should be recorded, not just financial ones. Why should there be any secrecy in a public body? How would Americans react if Congress held frequent secret votes?

Although lacking, both bills would still have been invaluable at a time when the integrity of the Senate has repeatedly come into question.

As could be expected, both bills were rejected.

On Sunday, those who rejected both pieces of legislation further solidified the notion that the Senate is nothing more than a self-serving entity for individuals involved in other campus organizations.

Its purpose is to serve NIU students, but instead, it serves itself.

Senators Colleen Murphy and Ricky Garcia both went on record as being against the first bill – both are paid members of CAB.

In fact, five of the 31 senate seats are held by CAB executive officers. It’s easy to see why many senators wouldn’t want to police themselves. They have hands in both cookie jars.

The assertion that students do, or should, trust senators wholeheartedly is absurd. Yet some senators, either because they are delusional or driven by self-interest, think that by voting anonymously, or voting to hand funding to their own organizations without public record, they are in some way doing NIU students justice.