"Liberal" Black Democrat Calls Cops On Sheehan, Arrests 48

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff07242007.html


July 24, 2007


Conyers Calls Cops to Arrest Cindy Sheehan and Other Impeachment
Demonstrators


Overcoming John Conyers

By DAVE LINDORFF

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.

The American public has made it clear: we want impeachment and we want
the troops home.