At last, a reporter has gotten the truth out of John Conyers - namely Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow. And it is unbearably painful to read.
AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Conyers, it was interesting to see you at this major rally in Newark on Saturday. About more than a thousand people were there. It was the largest demonstration against war and violence at home for decades in Newark. Now, you spoke at the rally. Interestingly, people were there who had been arrested in your office, the forty-five in July who had been arrested because they were calling for you to continue to back the call for impeachment of President Bush. What is your response?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, my response is that we have several things to do in -- I begin this part of our conversation by indicating that I have nothing but the highest regard for Cindy Sheehan. But the question of how we orchestrate moving a congressional schedule forward of accomplishments -- we’re pretty proud of what we’ve done in eight months after having no control over the agenda for twelve years. We also are trying to make sure that we don’t bring resolutions or hearings that would put the election in jeopardy. We could close down the Congress -- I have been in more impeachment hearings than anybody in the House or the Senate. And our legislative attempts to reverse so many things would come to a stop. And it is doubtful if we wouldn’t go into an election with not one, but at least two attempts to remove the top executive officers in the country, I don’t think that that can happen.
What are the "accomplishments" of the Democratic Congress? They have done nothing to bring our troops home from Iraq and nothing to restore the Constitution - the two most important issues they face. In fact, they only made things worse on both fronts, by funding Bush's "surge" and by legalizing warrantless wiretapping.
AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Conyers, on the issue of the warrantless wiretapping, on the one hand you’ve had the Democrats going after Gonzales fiercely for the Bush administration’s secret warrantless domestic surveillance program, yet signing off on the recent bill that the Bush administration had pushed for for further warrantless wiretapping.
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, the leadership was, of course, against the bill, and the majority of Democrats voted against the bill. But we’ve got this consideration: we’ve got 233 Democrats; forty of them are Blue Dogs, that is, conservative Democrats that frequently vote Republican. And then we have another group that are new to the Congress in their first term elected from red state congressional districts, which they felt that they would not be able to come back, and we couldn’t get them over. So we didn’t have all of our Democrats. It was not a solid position. But the leadership, Pelosi and I and Reyes, the head of the Intelligence Committee, we pleaded with everybody to vote with us in caucus, and we weren’t able to persuade some of the new members, and we weren’t able to persuade some of the Blue Dogs.
Of course this isn't news to any of us who followed that vote, but it's interesting to learn that the "Bush Dogs" explicitly defied their Democratic leaders when they betrayed the Constitution and legalized warrantless wiretapping.
So what do we do about the "Bush Dogs"? First, we need to keep building Congressional District Impeachment Committees to organize within all 435 Congressional Districts, including "Bush Dog" districts.
Second, we need to recruit progressive primary challengers for those "Bush Dogs." Our friends at OpenLeft.com are moving in the direction of primaries with their "Bush Dog" campaign. Right now they are asking bloggers to write profiles of all the "Bush Dogs" to identify those who are completely out of touch with their Democratic voters.
AMY GOODMAN: Why would impeachment hearings put the election in jeopardy?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, because unless I’ve got the Constitution in one hand and a calculator in the other, so I’ve got any kind of hearings on removing both the President and the Vice President -- or putting it in reverse, remove the Vice President and then the President -- within the months remaining, would require 218 votes in the House of Representatives. That’s my calculator giving me this information. And then, in the Senate we need two-thirds to convict. Notwithstanding all of my progressive friends that would love to see me start impeachment hearings, those votes I do not think exist in the House of Representatives or in the US Senate.
Of course we've heard this "we don't have the votes" excuse endlessly, and not just from Congress - also from top bloggers like Kos.
Impeachment starts with hearings to determine if there is sufficient evidence, just like a grand jury. Those hearings are held in the House Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by John Conyers. If the evidence is solid - and of course it already is - then the Members of Congress will be under tremendous pressure from their constituents to vote for impeachment. So there might not be 218 votes today, but I have no doubt there will be when the hearings are finished.
As for the Senate, their role under the Constitution is to conduct the trial on the Articles of Impeachment brought to them by the House. If those Articles are solid, the Senate will find itself facing the same constituent pressure as their House colleagues. And those Republican Senators who are up for re-election in 2008 will be under especially intense pressure.
Conyers seems completely blind to the dynamic nature of the impeachment process - how the discovery of evidence changes the political climate. Conyers' blindness is astonishing because he was in the House during the impeachment of Richard Nixon. When the Watergate investigation began, there were no "yes" votes on anyone's "calculator." But as evidence and witnesses led the investigation closer and closer to Nixon himself, the American people demanded impeachment, and Congress followed.
The same process unfolded this year with the U.S. Attorney investigation, which Republicans dismissed for months by claiming the firings were completely ok because U.S. Attorneys "serve at the pleasure of the President." But when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales repeatedly lied to Congress, public pressure for his resignation or impeachment became overwhelming.
So why is Conyers so blind?
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Congressman Conyers, if you weren’t holding your calculator, if you were just deciding whether impeachment was called for here, what would be the reasons you would list?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: What would be the reasons that I would what?
AMY GOODMAN: What would be the reasons you would list for impeachment, if you weren’t holding your calculator, just holding the Constitution?
REP. JOHN CONYERS: Oh, OK. Well, to me, we can accomplish probably as much as we would need to to make the record clear that there has been a great deal of violation of the sworn oath of office, abuses of power, through the hearings and inquiries that we can conduct. But it isn’t that -- and no one has ever heard me suggest that we don’t think that there is conduct that could be proven to be impeachable.
But when Ron Dellums and Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug and William Fitts Ryan of New York, when we -- Parren Mitchell -- when we introduced an impeachment resolution, the first one against a sitting president in over seventy-five years, when Richard Nixon was being investigated, it was at the beginning of his term. And although he had been overwhelmingly reelected, there was time for us to have the hearing. This -- the timing of an administration which will go down in history as probably one of the most disappointing, there isn’t the time here for it.
This is another infuriating argument. There are at least 10 solid grounds for impeachment. Some of these would require a lengthy investigation, but others require no investigation at all - especially Bush's defiance of Congressional subpoenas, which was one of the three Articles of Impeachment for Richard Nixon. Hearings on that issue could be completed in a week and put before the Judiciary Committee for a vote. The question for Congress would be simple: is the President above the law? Any Member of Congress who says yes can write their political obituary because they will be defeated in 2008.
Rep. Conyers, do you care to respond to these substantive disagreements to your unacceptably weak arguments?