When George W. Bush was elected President, some of us had already read Molly Ivins’ book about him and had a feeling he was going to be a bad President. He got along with people in Texas but he also signed more death warrants for executions than any other governor in any state in the U. S. We also knew his governmental papers had been sealed in his father’s presidential library with no one being given access.
But the new President Bush would have to store his papers somewhere along with his library so SMU, according to reports, began planning on how that could come to their campus. He said he was a Methodist and his wife Laura was a graduate of SMU. And some of the Bush family friends who had financed much of the new President’s political career were on the SMU Board.
The Bush administration led us into a war of choice against Iraq in 2003 and did it so poorly that American troops had little or no armor to protect themselves from IEDs and sniper fire. The Bush administration turned a lot of the war over to mercenaries like Blackwater who had little or no military discipline and were not held accountable when they violated rules of engagement. The military was encouraged to use torture on prisoners in Abu Graib. Arguments over rights being lost in the Patriot Act and secret policies that were coming to light were not enough to prevent President Bush from being re-elected.
In 2005, a group representing the Bush library asked SMU to submit a proposal. In December of 2006, SMU was named as one of the finalists by the Bush Foundation.
Dr. Andrew Weaver circulated a petition which got 12,000 signatures nationally protesting the Bush Foundation/SMU linkage. Faculty on SMU joined in the protest and at a faculty senate meeting on March 7, 2007, nearly overturned the linkage. Their main object was to not allow an institute which would not be subject to University control.
A week later, a group called the Mission Council which was made up of some bishops and some laity from the South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church voted to allow a lease between SMU and the Bush Foundation. The jurisdiction owns SMU and needed to make the final decision. However, the Mission Council had been formed to provide for inter-meeting decision-making.
Protests continued against the institute and in general against the Bush Foundation as the Bush administration hid behind a unitary executive policy and refused to allow any viewing of their e-mails or meeting notess despite federal law requiring such access.
The Bush Foundation then asked the College of Bishops of the jurisdiction to rule on the authority of the Mission Council to permit lease signing. On January 9, 2008, after a telephone poll, the bishops supported the Mission Council’s authority.
At least one of those Bishops, Scott Jones, was on the SMU Board, the Mission Council, and the College of Bishops. There is no sign he recused himself but more likely that he asserted himself in getting the results that would forward the lease signing.
Six weeks later, SMU signed a 99 year lease with the Bush Foundation for $1,000, with the option of extending that lease out to 249 year. This time line and these figures come from THE DAILY CAMPUS, an independent SMU campus newspaper, for February 26, 2008.
General Conference received a petition from Dr. Weaver requesting that the South Central Jurisdiction drop the lease. General Conference, in May of 2008, referred the petition to the jurisdiction which was to meet in July.
After a spirited debate at the jurisdictional conference, the referred petition was defeated and the conference voted to accept the action of the Mission Council to allow the lease. A Perkins staff member then asked the presiding bishop a question of law in effect asking if the miniscule lease price provided backdoor funding that supported the ideology of the Bush instiutute, something that was contrary to the Discipline and SMU charter.
The bishop responded that the question was moot and hypothetical. But the Discipline requires that ruling and the question be reviewed by the Judicial Council at their October, 2008, meeting. The ruling came too late and so the matter was held over until April of 2009.
The Council ruled that the matter had indeed been before the conference and that the bishop should have answered the question. They went into the Discipline, the Jurisdiction’s own rules of procedure, and the SMU charter to determine if everything was all right with the vote by the conference. They ruled that the conference vote validated the lease and that the Mission Council had acted properly. They did not have the lease information, however, so they were unable to make a judgment on the major issue of the question of law. But since the vote had been made by the conference, they supported the legitimacy of the lease.
One thing some of us wondered about was what the Dean of Perkins would do. He was both on the Judicial Council and was SMU’s PR man for the Bush Foundation project.
As has been the practice with this Judicial Council, he removed himself from the discussion and also did not vote on the case. Another member who had once been on the SMU Board made note of that relationship but said he did not recuse himself because he was not on that Board when the Bush people contacted SMU or during any of the time of the negotiations.
I find two more possible problems in the case which I wish the Council had handled as well.
One may sound more like a “Monday morning quarterback” fuss. The College of Bishops should have reported their ruling to the Judicial Council for review.
Taking the principle of law from Judicial Council Decision 331 that matters that are similar should be construed together, any request for a ruling of law should follow Disciplinary authority (may a secular group seek a judicial ruling outside of the normal appeals and conference processes?) and if so, should that ruling be reviewed as any question of law must be by the Judicial Council?
The Judicial Council should be very sensitive to those who take over their job.
The other flaw I perceive is that the Judicial Council missed a whole body of law in their careful study of the documents related to process and authority: their own precedents in church law made among previous decisions.
As far back as 1946, the Judicial Council ruled that no body can abandon its own powers and grant them to a subsidiary group. JCD 38 says, "No authority is given in the Constitution of the Church for it to delegate its powers in such a manner as to deprive itself of that basic or ultimate power." I was startled at how many decisions since have maintained that precedent.
If that precedent had been acknowledged, the Mission Council’s decision could not have been taken as final and the lease should not have been signed until after Jurisdictional Conference,
Conclusion
The Bush administration’s unwillingness to be transparent may be not only propagated by the institute but may actually interfere with any scholarly and public access to the archives. That and so much about the Bush administration has brought shame to our nation and so much damage to the world (failure to act on global warming, use of torture, using war instead of diplomacy, etc.) that I fear how that will spill over onto SMU.
I see a die cast in which the Judicial Council inadvertently did not prevent and others of us failed to stop.
