Brace yourselves. With another year of hardship and austerity ahead of us, we’re about to hear the term “student power” repeated incessantly thanks to the good people in our student government. 

This time last year, I stepped into the Associated Students of Madison’s office in the Student Activity Center and noted a few changes to the space – most notably that a graffitied piece of canvas had been added depicting several clenched fists risen in the air to show solidarity with, well, something. But “student power” became the session’s unofficial motto, and the idea even swept Sup. Leland Pan out of the SAC and into the City-County Building amid a wave of progressive discontent. Many ASM graduates and defectors have taken their talents and hate for the two-party system to the Madison-based headquarters of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

Things couldn’t be more different this year. ASM’s two most senior office-holders are conservatives who make no apologies for their loathing of last year’s session and the left-wing dystopia it became.

But even Chair Andrew Bulovsky, perhaps one of the most conservative students to sit on ASM in the last several years, was able to bite the bullet and lobby against the University of Wisconsin’s projected budget cuts with his progressive colleagues on United Council. And former Student Services Finance Committee Chair Sarah Neibart, still on SSFC and supposedly receiving a plethora of job offers from hard-right Republicans, has led an effort to challenge the state and the Board of Regents on their faulty policy with segregated fees. Her favorite term to promote the cause?

“Student power.”

So it’s settled, then. Students need power. With a current student and recent alumnus serving student districts on the Dane County Board and Madison City Council, respectively, we exert significant enough power on the local level. But I’m not satisfied. Despite ASM’s bipartisan nature and UC’s attempts to represent student interests, everyone at the Capitol seems to think we’re full of it.

That’s not really our fault, either. Student-heavy assembly districts have been represented wonderfully by departing Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat who will likely take Tammy Baldwin’s place in Congress. 

The same can’t be said about the other representatives who serve us up State Street. Rep. Brett Hulsey, who no longer represents most of campus because of redistricting,  has ridden a roller-coaster of embarrassment throughout his freshman term, often leading to rejection within his own caucus and, most recently, ridicule for his unusual public behavior. He has, in only two years, managed to bend the truth about endorsements in his campaign literature, cast himself as the misunderstood hero of the union protests, ran a bizarre advertisement implying he would run against Gov. Scott Walker in a recall election, and most recently has fought off media coverage of a disorderly conduct charge that involves him allegedly taking pictures of young children on Independence Day. 

To make matters worse, Rep. Terese Berceau is a Madison unknown who enjoys her safe seat and doesn’t really do much in the way of student outreach. Her only decent idea that has received public attention in the last several years was a proposal to raise the keg tax. And Rep. Chris Taylor, another freshman, is apparently such a poor legislator that Segway Jeremy Ryan decided to mount a campaign against her that never quite got off the ground. 

It has become clear in the last two years that the only solution to the shutting out of students at the Capitol is to pick the lock and let ourselves back in through electoral means. Berceau is safe in her seat, but Hulsey will likely be a perennially unpopular candidate whose victory is only assured by the “D” next to his name. In 2014, a practical campaign could be waged against Taylor or Berceau, but for now Hulsey is the most vulnerable candidate. 

Now is the perfect opportunity to stage a write-in campaign against Hulsey led by a current student or recent alumnus with the desire to turn at least one Madison-area Assembly district into an area represented by students, much like District 8 on the City Council. It shouldn’t matter if the candidate is an undergraduate or a student from the graduate school, but the idea of an office staffed and managed by some of the brightest students at UW is enough to make me want to watch Peter Pan to remind myself how he fought off Captain Hook … I mean Rep. Steve Nass.

Oh, and if this hypothetical write-in campaign plays its cards right and does not align itself with a political party, it might provide a direct service to UW students. Not a bad use for segregated fees, right?

Ryan Rainey ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism and Latin American studies.