Ram Model Congress '09: Day 1

This a part of new Model Congress 2009 series which will start with today’s Tyler Talk and extend until the final day of Model Congress 2009. According to my Calendar, for me my last day, weather permitting will be Tuesday, February 24.


Today was the first day of Ram Model Congress. There wasn’t much in terms of debate of anything, because it was the first day and everything needs a day or so to get organized. This includes electing the President, the Speaker of the House, Clerks, and the House Majority/Minority Leaders and Whips. We also organized into committees. I am part of the Democratic Party and I am a member of the Science and Technology Committee. In my class only one other person is on that comittee, Bobby Bray who is a a member of the Republican Party.
For today, the Democrats nominated and elected our Speaker of the House (since we have a majority in Congress), and our House Majority Leader and our House Majority Whip. Our class is the only sophomore class and we have four other senior class so the intimidation factor does stand out here. The seniors were rowdy and immature, plus they did not take this whole process seriously. Hey, they’re seniors they’re excited about leaving Robinson in a few months and college is a whiff away. I can understand, I’ll probably be the same in about two years. Mr. Hemingway also really noted the Senior’s immaturity and consistently pointed it out.

We elected this African American kid that dressed rather urban today as our Speaker of the House. He was cracking up everyone with jokes like “everyone makes mistakes”, but I honestly picked him, because he was serious when he was talking and not trying to be a comedian up there. He was without trying to be one, and pointing out that was the last thing he wanted to do. Plus, the other two candidates, one being in my class, seemed a little bit nervous saying their speeches in front of our group of at least sixty, maybe seventy people. Literally, only about six people combined voted for the others, and since no one in our group wrote a speech other than those three they would become also our House Majority Leader and Whip.

After that we began to discuss issues we would like to bring up at future meetings, but we interrupted by the bell about half way through, so I’m going to guess we will wrap up with that tomorrow, and we will start tomorrow getting into committees.