Bush-Basher-in-Chief
John Conyers (D-MI) is the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and you can be sure that it is not his intellect or his accomplishments on behalf of the nation that he has achieved such a powerful position. It is because he has been in Congress since January 4, 1965! Don’t take my word for it, listen to him: “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” He’s referring to the 1300+ page bill that details the government takeover of the healthcare industry in the US. [This is funny: One pundit has proposed, The Help John Conyers Read The Damn Bill Act of 2009. See it at webcommentary.com –you’ll enjoy it as I did.] Too much for him to read or understand without lawyers –he has a law degree –but that was long ago. Of course, it wouldn’t give him a reason to not vote for the Bill. In his 44 years in congress he has signed just about every costly bill laid in front of him by his leadership. His National Taxpayers Union rating “F” is the lowest possible grade going way back.
None of our Poster Children have done anything before politics that might give them some insight or expertise in the market segments that they are regulating, or lately, taking over. Conyers is no exception. Before his election in 1965, he was an assistant to Congressman John Dingell who is still in Congress –another Poster Boy candidate. He is married to Monica Conyers, former President Pro-Tempore of the Detroit City Council and the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation into political corruption in the city. She has pled guilty to conspiring to commit bribery. Conyers himself ran for mayor of Detroit a couple of times while on our payroll in Congress. Reading about and seeing videos of Monica’s antics on the Detroit council are alternately pathetic and very funny. No wonder Detroit is in the dumpster. BTW, she was born a couple of months before John was elected to Congress.
Conyers has had his ethics problems over the years, too. He violated House rules by using his congressional staff to work on campaigns and forced them to baby-sit and chauffeur his children. The Ethics Committee let it pass as they usually do for their colleagues. I guess they figure, “I may be next.” This is a body not renowned for their high ethical standards –currently there are 17 ongoing ethics investigations n Congress, 4 Repubs and 13 Dems.
One of the most liberal members of Congress, Conyers was one of the founding members of the hard left Black Caucus. He was also one of the original sponsors in 2003 of The United States National Health Care Act, a single-payer plan like the one that is being debated in Congress at this time. When Obama was considering naming Dr. Sanjay Gupta to the post of Surgeon General, Conyers went ballistic. It seems that Gupta once got into an argument with Michael Moore, a friend of Conyers, over Moore’s movie “Sicko” which advocated socialized medicine. Conyers was afraid that Gupta would not be a backer of the one-payer system. Conyers’ signature issue is the one-payer socialized medicine plan for the masses. But, notably, the Bills proposed specifically exempt members of Congress. THAT is the arrogance of self-service as opposed to the ideal of public service.
A consummate Bush-basher, he offered a Report, The Constitution in Crisis, which purported that President Bush violated the Constitution in prosecuting the Iraq war. It called for censure of both the president and vice president. Before that he issued another Report, What Went Wrong in Ohio, to try to have the votes for President Bush not counted because of some of the discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote tallies. He even filed a lawsuit, Honorable John Conyers, Jr., et al. v. George W. Bush, et al, seeking a restraining order to prevent the execution of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. He wanted it declared unconstitutional. The case was dismissed for his lack of standing. Don’t forget Conyers has a law degree –he knew he didn’t have standing but went out of his way to harass the president. He also introduced a bill to set up a “truth commission” panel to investigate alleged policy abuses of the Bush administration.
Conyers has proposed a Resolution to condemn religious intolerance for Islam which he said needed special protection from acts of violence and intolerance. It states that “it should never be official policy of the United States Government to disparage the Quran, Islam, or any religion in any way, shape, or form,” and “calls upon local, State, and Federal authorities to work to prevent bias-motivated crimes and acts against all individuals, including those of the Islamic faith.” A strictly political act as there are now a lot of Muslims in his district. We already have freedom of religion in the US.
We can’t cover much of a 44 year career but we try to illustrate that 6 or 8 years would be plenty for any representative to get something done and then go home to live under the laws and pay the taxes he imposed on the country. And that is the way it would work IF the representative was there for “public service.” Career pols do not give a thought to their oaths of office.
