What did John Conyers want?
That’s the question I kept asking myself while watching the highly stylized kabuki-theater-like unfolding of the impeachment drama yesterday afternoon outside Conyers' office.
Getting arrested for civil disobedience in the District of Columbia isn’t what it used to be. If you go through the process of applying for a demonstration permit, there is a check-off box on the form asking if you are planning to have people arrested as part of your demonstration.
Knowing that people intend to risk arrest, leaves the police to determine the timing of the arrests, and things stay under control (from the police point of view) -- in contrast to the arrests at a World Bank demo a few years ago in which DC police sealed off whole city blocks and arrested everyone who happened to be on the street at that moment -- an unconstitutional procedure for which arrestees have won huge judgments against the city.
Don’t get me wrong -- even in such a well-choreographed encounter, there were moments of very high emotion. I was standing a bit down from Conyers’ office in the long, narrow, high-ceilinged hall when the crowd broke out into a single-word chant: IMPEACH. IMPEACH. IMPEACH.
The sound that hit me built quickly to a true roar, a ferocious, angry, deep from-the-guts roar, in which I could feel, just for a moment, the sound I last heard from hundreds of thousands of people at a march to stop the Vietnam War. If such a sound continued, you could feel the power there to change the world.
The police in the hall were stung to action. Any more chanting, said the officer in charge, and he’d arrest everyone. The chanting stopped.
What did Conyers want?
When Conyers agreed to this meeting last week, he knew that if he did not emerge with an announcement that he would order impeachment hearings, there would be a mass arrest in his office. The people being hauled away were not his political enemies: they were people with whom he and his staff have long-established relationships built on their respective efforts to end the war.
Given these relationships, Conyers could not possibly have thought he was going to change any hearts and minds about getting arrested if he failed to deliver.
So why did he agree to the meeting?
We know that the Democratic leadership is so frightened by the possibility of trying to impeach Bush that Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the extraordinary step of announcing that impeachment was "not on the table."
And it is a brutal fact of life inside the odious body of the House that any member, and especially the chair of a powerful committee, who chooses to oppose the leadership can be made to pay a fearsome price, that the leadership can destroy that member’s effectiveness for years to come.
So members, even the best of them like Conyers, understandably vacillate when confronted with the kind of choice Conyers is facing.
And to what high principles do we hold our House and Senate members? It is the nature of the legislative beast to live to fight another day. Can you remember a member of Congress resigning from office to protest the passage of a noxious piece of legislation? No, Members accept the vote, lick their wounds, and go back to work trying to change the outcome in the future.
In the heat of an illegal war, where each new day brings a death sentence for more American soldiers and untold numbers of Iraqis, the slowness of this legislative process is infuriating and unacceptable. Inside the body, members celebrate the slow accretion of support, as if stopping a war should proceed at the rate at which an oyster makes a pearl. The Senate goes from a pathetic handful of members voting to end the war to an absolute, but not sufficient majority, and Senators hail the growth in support as bringing the day closer when the war might end. But the war continues.
Like everyone else who was out there in the hall outside Conyers’ office, I hoped against hope that Conyers would emerge and announce that he would initiate impeachment hearings. But I never really thought he would take such a momentous step in such a setting. Announcing hearings without having sufficient support within his own committee would be politically suicidal, essentially destroying Conyers’ ability to lead on anything else in the future.
So why did he agree to the meeting?
My charitable conclusion is that Conyers wanted to send a very visible signal to the Democratic leadership that the public’s patience is running out. People are sick and tired of waiting for the Democrats to end the war, to impeach Bush for his manifold high crimes and misdemeanors, and to start rebuilding our much-abused Constitutional guarantees of freedom and liberty.
At yesterday’s event, everyone was under control. But if Pelosi knows her history, she knows that the failure of Congress to respond to great wrongs like this war leads inexorably towards a time in which the people decide to stop playing by the rules. And nothing frightens politicians more than the possibility that the public might actually take their future into their own hands. Ending a war is one thing. Losing control is another thing entirely.
(cross-posted from the Democracy Cell Project)