As one of the Student Government senators elected by my constituents, I must respond to Chelsea Schmidt’s false and slanderous accusations about Student Government. Everyone who was elected from the executive branch down to every senator was elected to represent and serve the student body at Iowa State.

Our mandate was to address issues like overcrowding, keeping tuition low and addressing our constituents’ needs. Nowhere in this mandate was there a call to join ourselves to an outside organization that through our investigation has been shown to be associated with nefarious radical causes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the needs of Iowa State. We were not elected to ban military recruiters and ROTC from campus as has happened on numerous campuses that have joined with USSA.

We were not elected to pass a resolution calling for the academic, cultural and economic boycott of Israel. We were not elected to harass, discriminate and intimidate conservative students such as is happening on campuses such as UNC, Oberlin College and Virginia Tech — all campuses where their student governments joined with USSA. USSA is more than welcome to become a registered student group that follows the same rules and policies that the rest of us students have to follow.

I am an out and openly proud conservative who sits with liberals, libertarians, leftists and moderates who all want to better students’ lives at Iowa State. We all put aside our partisan differences and said no to USSA overwhelmingly. We did this because our constituents wanted this. We said no to using student fee money that would have cost about $22,000 of our student fee money to pay for extremist causes that serve no student on this campus.

If we caved into this organization’s demands, that would mean less money for student clubs and events that are indigenous to Iowa State. We said no because we care about the students, unlike Schmidt, who just wants to whine and rant because we saw through the b.s. Our Student Government is a no b.s. body and we intend to see that through.