Former USC Undergraduate Student Government (USG) speaker Diana Carpio resigned Wednesday night after the senate voted to remove her in an anonymous two-thirds decision. Before Carpio’s removal, USG amended meeting rules a week prior after realizing there was no formal process for removing a speaker without removing the individual from USG entirely.
“At the end of the day, I think what was really called in the removal [of] the speaker was a personal issue,” Carpio said.
However, multiple sources in USG, who would only speak to Annenberg Media on the condition of anonymity, disagreed with Carpio’s characterization.
“I disagree that there were personal reasons,” a source within USG familiar with the senate said. The source declined to give specifics about the nature of the complaints.
Annenberg Media confirmed with USG Vice President Brianna Sanchez that the then-Speaker Carpio had canceled multiple meetings with short notice, once in October and twice in November.
According to the 2024-2025 bylaws, the speaker of the senate must hold regular meetings that precede the USG Senate Meeting.
“I owned accountability for a couple of communication mistakes that I made,” Carpio said. “One specific example I can cite is the cancellation of a pre-senate meeting five minutes before the meeting was supposed to happen. However, there was nothing to discuss during the meeting. So I chose to give senators back an hour of their day on the weekends, instead of holding people there for a discussion that wasn’t even there.”
Susanna Andryan, the chief justice of USG, said that no formal complaint has been filed to the Judicial Council which is made up of herself along with five associate justices. Andryan oversaw the voting process, which she said finished in five minutes and went, “really smoothly.”
“You’re a neutral body,” Andryan said regarding her role in the student government. “You kind of just go with the flow. Whatever happens, happens, and you’re just there to oversee that everyone is following the bylaws and constitution.”
Carpio did not have plans to resign, but has since left despite being allowed to serve her full tenure.
“At the end of the day, we respect her decision, and she has to do what’s best for herself,” said USG Vice President Brianna Sanchez in an interview with Annenberg TV News. “And if that’s her decision, then we’ll move forward and try to pursue the same projects that she wanted and ensure that she still has a great legacy in USG.”
Under the new rules, a senator with support from two other senators can email the judicial council to vote for removal without a reason or a unanimous approval from the executive cabinet, with the exception of the speaker of the senate. The judicial council then has 48 hours to schedule a meeting where the senators vote anonymously.
Although Carpio was initially unconcerned by the change, senators later voted her out of the speaker role, with Chief Justice Susanna Andryan presiding over the vote. The executive cabinet was not present when Carpio was removed.
Sanchez thinks the removal came down to the role of the speaker and Carpio’s performance, but could not say definitively due to the varying opinions among the senators.
“I can’t speak for the senators. I know there [were] very different perspectives on her role,” Sanchez said. “Because we are overseeing the entire legislative branch, the Speaker of the Senate is more concerned, more focused on the senators themselves. And so I can’t really speak on what specifically they may have seen as the reason to remove her, but I do know that as for the executive cabinet, we were going to respect whatever decision they made.”
The speaker serves as the communication between the 12 senators and the executive cabinet, voicing any information that comes from either side.
“The senators [chose] me, at the beginning of my term, to be their speaker,” Carpio said. “It is a little crazy to think that they were the same ones who voted me out, but that’s definitely not something I’m bitter about.”
Carpio was first elected in early spring by a vote of 6-5, when USG had 11 senators. Previously, she served as a senator. Sanchez will lead the search to find a new speaker.