A Cameo by the Old John Conyers
Friday, August 31st, 2007 by RLRFrom The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild
I’d been waiting for the old John Conyers to reappear.
Conyers rightfully brags about being a leader in the movement to impeach Richard Nixon back in the day.
And in the last Congressional term, before the Democrats took over, Conyers introduced a bill to explore grounds for impeaching Bush. He explained to Lewis Lapham of Harper’s in early 2006 why he was doing so:
“ ‘To take away the excuse,’ he said, ‘that we didn’t know.’ So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, ‘Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?’ when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that ‘somehow it escaped our notice’ that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.”
Well, this old John Conyers made a cameo on Tuesday at a town hall meeting in Detroit.
Now the head of the House Judiciary Committee, he finally declared his independence from Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the urgent question of impeachment.
According to rawstory.com, Conyers said: “Nancy Pelosi has impeachment ‘off the table,’ but that’s off her table. It is not off John Conyers’s table.”
That’s a relief, since I thought Pelosi had permanently gagged Conyers on the subject.
Not anymore.
Read more Conyers
The awful power of the American government remains in the hands of the arrogant, incompetent and ever more desperate neocons, led by the Chicken Hawk in Chief who would rather ride his bike than perform the due diligence his office demands. These will be the most dangerous days since the Cuban Missile Crisis. We are in critical ways more defenseless against our own government than we are against our declared enemies. Those who can and should defend us, the House Democrats, are intimidated by the responsibility they sought, won, and now duck. It can be argued that the strongest restraint on Bush might be purposeful movement in the House on an impeachment resolution, but Pelosi does not appear prepared to act. It may have seemed to be smart politics to “take impeachment off the table,” but it was an act fundamentally faithless to the Constitution she swore an oath to uphold. Impeachment is the only recourse against a second-term President who abuses his office and endangers the 300 million of us. No Speaker is entitled to nullify or cede that critical provision of the Constitution.