And they cut how long unemployment runs, and make regulations that deliberately split up families - a single mom can get crap coverage, but if she's not single, sorry, she gets nothing.
]]>In the US, they've been doing this with the Senate.
]]>The Sheckley story referenced above ended with him wishing for a wife whose libido was so high he could just barely satisfy her.
]]>Why yes, teenage me was a horrible rules-lawyer when playing AD&D. :-)
]]>I would doubtless have enjoyed making sure that your character was killed horribly by rabid wombats.
]]>Don't have an account there, so I couldn't say, but YouTube is fairly overrun with them.
]]>As I understand American politics, it is a political campaign. He has to persuade enough senators not to convict him, and ideally make enough congressmen scared of electoral consequences that they vote against impeachment so that it doesn't reach the senate.
It's certainly not a criminal trial conducted by a trained and impartial judiciary. (Although with what I've heard about how judges are elected and/or appointed I wonder how impartial your judiciary is, too.)
]]>"I'd read he was spending big bucks on Facepalm in anti-impeachment ads, as his "strategy" to stop the impeachment, as though it were a political campaign...."
As I understand American politics, it is a political campaign. He has to persuade enough senators not to convict him, and ideally make enough congressmen scared of electoral consequences that they vote against impeachment so that it doesn't reach the senate.
It's certainly not a criminal trial conducted by a trained and impartial judiciary. (Although with what I've heard about how judges are elected and/or appointed I wonder how impartial your judiciary is, too.)
Your understanding is, as we say here, "Close enough for government work!".
On the whole, where judges are/were appointed (especially those having to be confirmed by the Senate) they're more impartial than elected judges ... although that has been changing in the last decade or so with the hyper-partisan Federalist Society having taken over the selection process for judicial nominations on the GOP side.
They're not just Gerrymandering Congressional Districts and state legislatures.
]]>As I understand American politics, it is a political campaign.
I think of it as an employment performance review, one conducted by the Legislative Branch. The intent of impeachment (synonyms: accusation, indictment) by the House and possible subsequent conviction by the Senate is to decide whether or not a Federal officer has been fulfilling his/her oath of office, either doing the job or screwing up and failing. Federal officers judged to have woefully failed get sacked (and sometimes also told 'and also you are blacklisted for future employment'). That's what it's about.
It's frequently been clarified -- correctly -- that impeachment/conviction is not a criminal-law process. However, the usual fallback explanation that (therefore) it's a political process isn't quite on the mark, either. Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers' term 'high crimes and misdemeanours' is particularly unhelpful, falsely suggesting to modern ears a criminal-law framing. The correct framing, IMO, is: performance review and possible consequent sacking.
Hope that helps.
(FWIW, the phrase 'high crimes and misdemeanours' appears to have been a last-minute kludge after a lot of arguing. The term 'high' means serious, not just petty stuff, and the rest means ''serious failure to fulfil the applicable oath of office'.)
Over the run-time of the US Constitution's applicability, impeachment/conviction's been mostly used to review the performance of Federal judges and sometimes sack them, for a variety of colourful reasons including drunken incompetence.
]]>