[wvns] Congressman Calls Cops on Cindy Sheehan
Conyers Calls Cops to Arrest Cindy Sheehan and Other Impeachment
Demonstrators
Overcoming John Conyers
By DAVE LINDORFF
July 24, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/lindorff07242007.html
Rep. John Conyers, venerable member of Congress, finally chair of the
House Judiciary Committee,is a man who worked with Rosa Parks in
Alabama and who hired her on his staff after he won election to
Congress in Detroit. Years in Washington DC change a man. Yesterday
Conyers had 48 impeachment activists, including Gold Star Families for
Peace founder Cindy Sheehan, Iraq Veteran Against the War activist
Lennox Yearwood and Intelligence Veterans for Sanity founder Ray
McGovern, arrested for conducting a sit-in in his office in the
Rayburn House Office Building. The three, together with several
hundred other impeachment activists who packed the fourth floor
hallway outside Rep. Conyers' office, had come to press Conyers to
take action on impeachment, and specifically to start action on H.Res.
333, the bill submitted nearly three months ago by Rep. Dennis
Kucinich calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.
After nearly an hour of talking with Conyers, a clearly angry Sheehan
emerged together with Yearwood and McGovern, and announced to the
waiting throng in the hall that Conyers had told them "impeachment
isn't going to happen because we don't have the votes." Sheehan said
Conyers had insisted that the best thing was for Democrats to focus on
"winning big in 2008." To volleys of boos and hisses, the three went
back inside Conyers' office suite, where they were joined by some
thirty other supporters, and all were subsequently arrested, at
Conyers' request, by Capitol police, who cuffed them and walked them
off for booking. Several of those who sat in refused to walk and were
carried or dragged out of the Rayburn Office Building, as the
activists in the hall chanted "Shame on Conyers! Shame onConyers!" and
"Arrest Bush, Not the People!"
It was a disgraceful scene wholly unworthy of a dean of the
Congressional Black Caucus. Before returning to sit in the Judiciary
chairman's office and await arrest, Sheehan publicly announced her
intention to run in 2008 as an independent candidate for Congress
against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and she called on Americans
everywhere to run not just against Republicans in 2008, but against
Democrats too. Yearwood, who is a chaplain in the Air Force, said that
Conyers had been a mentor to him, but he declared that he now felt
betrayed and that Americans needed to take back their government. As
he was led down the hall to his arraignment, the handcuffed Yearwood
sang "We Shall Overcome!"
This reporter subsequently called Conyers' press office for an
explanation of Conyers' true position on impeachment. Only a few days
earlier the congressman, at a San Diego meeting on health care reform,
had told members of Progressive Democrats of America that it was time
to "take these two guys (Bush and Cheney) out" and had promised that
if just "a few more" members of the House signed on to the Kucinich
bill (it already has 14 co-sponsors), he would move it forward for
consideration in his Judiciary Committee. Asked how that statement
squared with what he had told the group of activists in his office,
the spokesman said Conyers' "must have been misunderstood" in San
Diego. He said that in view of Conyers' statement to Sheehan and the
others today, the Kucinich bill was "not going to go anywhere."
As impeachment activist David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org has
said, there "seem to be two John Conyers." There's the one who, in
2005 and early 2006, while Republicans controlled the House, was
systematically making the case for impeaching the president and vice
president. This Conyers had even submitted a bill, with 39
co-sponsors, which called for creation of a select committee to
investigate possible impeachable crimes by the administration. And
then there's the Conyers who submits to the wishes of the new House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and is keeping impeachment off the table.
Occasionally the former Conyers breaks out, saying things such as that
the president needs to be "taken out" or, as he put it at an anti-war
rally last spring, that "we can fire him!" But then the other Conyers
comes to the fore, and stands in the way of impeachment action.
Yesterday, however, was worse than just doing nothing. The arrest of
impeachment activists and their forcible eviction from his office was
a betrayal of people who were doing the very thing that had allowed
Conyers to make his way into Congress in the first place: sitting in
to insist on action on their demands for justice. It was, after all,
sit-ins that helped lead to the Voting Rights Act which allowed
African American candidates like Conyers to finally win seats in the
US Congress.
It's ironic that Rep. Conyers, speaking in 2005 on "Democracy Now!"
following Rosa Parks' death at the age of 92, said her passing "is
probably the end of an era." Certainly, with his request to have
Capitol Police officers enter his office (the very office where Parks
once had worked as a staff member!) to cuff and arrest peaceful
protesters who were trying to defend the Constitution, he has made
that point far more clearly than he could have expressed it in mere words.
But as in the case of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights movement,
arrests and fines will not stop the national grassroots drive to
impeach this president and vice president. With polls showing that a
majority of the country now favors impeachment, and with Conyers,
Pelosi, and the Democratic Congress sinking deeper and deeper into
disfavor even as the president continues to add to his list of
Constitutional crimes, something's gotta give. After all, the
Founders, in writing impeachment into the Constitution, did not say
the test was whether Congress had the votes to impeach. They wrote
that if the president abused his power, or committed other high crimes
and misdemeanors, bribery or treason, Congress "shall" impeach.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage
Press. Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment",
co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.
He can be reached at: dlindorff @ yahoo.com
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