impeachment

This year, I was elected to share the role as representative of my department to the Graduate and Professional Student Organization at my university. Today I participated in my first meeting and official duty - an impeachment hearing for the Moderator. Let me tell you, it was some of the most fun I've had in a long time, just because I love to hear really impassioned people argue with very precise people. For example, I particularly enjoyed the exasperated guy who wanted to fight to the end about why we weren't following this one sentence in the bylaws to the letter versus the realistic chick who just wanted him to realize that that wasn't really what we were here to discuss.

In any case, I learned a lot about grad student politics:
1. No one actually knows what's in the Constitution.
2. No one actually knows what the Executive Committee does.
3. Half of the people who do show up to things like this are very worried about the letter of the law.
4. The other half just want to hear the facts, vote, and go eat dinner.
5. It doesn't matter what everything thinks, because it's going to take a long time regardless.

We had received a copy of the charges before the meeting, and reading them beforehand I thought that it was going to be a clear-cut "Impeach" vote. However, in the course of the hearing, I completely changed my mind, determining that the charges were not at all examples of "malfeasance, severe dereliction of duty, or egregious abuse of power." So did enough other people to dismiss the impeachment.

Politics is crazy, I know. And now I really understand why I wanted to have nothing to do with the government.