It’s a popular pastime among ISU students to criticize our Government of the Student Body and question its relevance to our lives.

“GSB is nothing more than a rubber stamp for the administration,” we write in letters and editorials.

“They’re all talk,” we say over onion rings at the M-Shop, just loud enough for the senator at the next table to overhear.

Perhaps there is a grain of truth in these statements — response to Veishea task force results, anyone? — but we must admit our student leaders bailed us out last week with their last-minute resolution denouncing a proposed keg ordinance.

The Story County Board of Supervisors was all set to pass the third and final reading Tuesday night of an ordinance that would have required beer keg buyers to register their names before hauling off and tapping their 15.5 gallons of malted beverage.

The board — a legislative body about as familiar to ISU students as Ecuador’s Congreso Nacional — had, and still has, every right to do this. It is, after all, the county’s lawmaking body, and went through all the proper methods of public discussion and parliamentary procedure to arrive at a final decision that night.

But it didn’t pass the ordinance. After hearing the sporadic and borderline hysterical complaints of students and, more persuasively, a hurried-but-composed resolution from GSB on the subject, the supervisors tabled the ordinance pending further discussion.

The board’s authority is apparently lost on students, who seem to think it swooped in from out of nowhere (or, rather, Nevada) three weeks ago to propose and pass this nefarious ordinance.

In reality, students simply ignored several opportunities to speak out against keg regulation and other possible alcohol policies at discussions led by the Story County Prevention Policy Board and Youth & Shelter Services Inc. in the past year and a half.

But luckily for us, GSB hopped into action at the 11th hour and produced a resolution opposing the ordinance at its Feb. 16 meeting — an action that lent some credibility to students’ concerns and made more dialogue possible.

But GSB resolutions alone won’t prevent this ordinance from being passed at some point in the future.

There are many legitimate reasons to keep this ordinance out of the books — we’ve seen them nearly every day for the past two weeks on the opinion pages of the Daily — but those reasons must be conveyed to the Board of Supervisors. By regular students. In person.

If students are serious about privacy and sure about the ineffectiveness of this ordinance, we must prove it to those with the power to make the final decision.

GSB can’t do it for us.