You forgot the most important restriction—Article 88, UCMJ.
"Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct."
In my time on active duty, I had to remind a couple of flag officers, a handful of colonels, a passel of majors and lieutenant colonels, and more junior officers than I could count about Article 88. (Of course, back then it didn't include the Secretary of Homeland Security.)
On the other hand, it looks like it's OK to be contemptuous of the CIA, the FBI, the Attorney General, individual members of Congress, or any judge. Yet another example of bad writing. It would have been much better to say:
"Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against any elected Federal officer, any civilian federal official who has been duly appointed and confirmed by the Senate (or whose office is subject to such confirmation), or the Governor, legislature, or judiciary of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present, shall be punished as a court-martial may direct."
The Wikipedia article isn't quite accurate. The actual sequence is:
* A member of the House moves for a bill of impeachment, which by House rules is referred to the Rules Committee, then to either the Judiciary Committee or a specially selected committee (anyone remember Peter Rodino?)
* The committee holds hearings and otherwise investigates, then reports the bill back to the House. Unlike virtually any other bill, a bill of impeachment cannot die in committee—it must be reported out on the request of even a single member of the House (not just the committee).
* The House then debates (ordinarily in closed session) and votes on the bill of impeachment. If the House votes the bill down, it's dead. If the House passes the bill,
* Trial will occur in the Senate. If the impeachment is of any elected or Senatorally confirmed member of the Executive Branch, the Vice President does not preside; instead, the Chief Justice of the United States, or an Article III judge selected by the Chief Justice, presides. The Senate may choose to have a judge, rather than the Vice President, preside over the trial on a majority vote.
* The Federal Rules of Evidence are in effect during the Senate trial, but the Senate itself judges whether the conduct constitutes a "high crime or misdemeanor," on the advice of the presiding officer.
* The Senate's vote is a roll-call vote, with a two-thirds majority required to sustain the bill of impeachment (technically, it is not a "conviction" because it is not in a court of law).
* Upon sustaining the bill of impeachment, the defendant officer is removed from all federal offices. That is the sole punishment for impeachment.
* Judicial review of the impeachment is virtually impossible under Hastings. Collateral attack (such as a civil suit claiming that the impeachment itself was improper) is explicitly disallowed; the Senate and House are the final judges of their own rules and procedures.
Just jumping in with a couple of random comments:
Education levels and scams: More education does not protect people from scams. Instead, what one needs are awareness and information. One of my clients, who got scammed by a notorious vanity press/fraudulent literary agent not far east of Youngstown, Ohio, is a judge. And not a stupid one, either; just unsophisticated about publishing at the time. However, he wised up, which puts him at the 96th percentile of scam victims. (That's right: only about 4% of scam victims ever realize they've been had without someone else pointing that out to them.)
Self-Publishing: I wrote a nasty correction letter to the Post on Rachel's drivel. In that letter, I pointed out both the Grisham factual error (it wasn't self-published) and that what she described is actually low-end vanity publishing, not self publishing. As I've noted before, the critical test is not the money flow, but who has legal title to the copies as they come off the press. If it's the author, we're talking about self-publishing (with a couple of negligible exceptions); if it's the publisher, we're definitely not talking about self-publishing (with no exceptions at all). I covered the whole illusory-self-publishing racket extensively at Scrivener's Error in August; just link to the August archive and scroll to the bottom, then read upward. TNH may disagree with some of what I said; keep in mind that most of my expertise/business in the publishing industry relates to serious nonfiction, so my perspective is somewhat different from hers. Trust her on how Tor works, or even the slightly broader area of speculative fiction publishing!
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