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I was just rewatching the video of Rob Kall interviewing John Conyers about impeachment.
Now perhaps I am misunderstanding this, but what it looks like to me is that Rob appears to still think that Congress has an oversight or check-and-balance function in government, and Conyers doesn't dare come right out and say that it doesn't.
Some time back I wrote a little parable about how Congress operates and why Conyers can't impeach. I called it The Fable of Lanova Messiah.
Our government is not the sort of bottom-up system that Rob is so fond of. It is a top-down system. Congress is not the top. The White House is not the top. There are policy-making bodies, like the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that select U.S. Presidents and make U.S. policy. But they are not at the top either. They were founded by the wealthy elite and serve the same purpose as any other bureaucracies. They have limited responsibilities and carry out the orders of their founders while shielding them from public wrath.
I had a discussion with John Conyers in July of '07 and wrote up a little essay in his defense. I didn't follow the chain-of-command further up from Poppy Bush to the Rockefellers because that link is covered by Poppy's habitual plausible deniability, but a bit of research would probably suffice to demonstrate that it exists.
I know that Conyers is the scapegoat du jour for those who need to blame somebody for our inability to impeach. We do not have the ability to impeach because that power was supposedly given to Congress, not to us. But what is given can be taken away. If Congress had the power to impeach at one time, it no longer does. We might do better heeding the words of President Bush and understanding that our Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper" and that it can neither grant nor take away the inalienable rights recognized in our Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Notice that the Declaration says that it is "the Right of the People," not the right of Congress. There was no Congress at that time. The Constitution had not yet been written and when it was, it did not secure to us the right to abolish any government which became destructive of our safety and happiness. It gave that power to Congress, but Congress sold out to the highest bidder, and that bidder was the corporations, not We the People. If there is to be a change, it will have to come from us, not from Congress, because Congress is now a mere bureaucracy and has no power to bring about change. File clerks don't tell the Board of Directors what to do.
When millions of us sign a petition to Conyers, he doesn't have the power to force the White House to even look at it. He demonstrated that clearly, getting TV coverage when he tried to deliver the Downing Street letter to the White House and was allowed only to pass it through the fence to a security guard. A senior Member of Congress can't even visit the White House without an invitation, so how do you expect one to oversee the White House? The White House doesn't respond to subpoenas and their Supreme Court won't make them.
I know it is painful to realize that this is not a democracy and that Congress is just a bureaucracy, but unless we face reality we are not going to be able to deal with it. When Conyers tried to deliver our signatures to the White House, he demonstrated to us as clearly as possible that the White House doesn't see Congress as even being fit to shine its shoes. It took a great deal of courage to let oneself be humiliated on prime time TV, but Conyers did what he had to do to show us what the problem is. And, for some strange reason, a lot of people just didn't get it. Conyers is not the problem. Congress is not the problem. WE are the problem because we keep asking them to do that which they cannot do.
If your family wasn't rich when you were a kid, there may have been a time when you asked your parents to buy you something that they couldn't afford. When they refused, you may have thought that you had bad parents or that they didn't love you. But when you grew up, you realized that they simply didn't have the power to get you everything that you wanted. And if you are a competent adult, you may have long since gotten a job, earned some money, and bought whatever it was you wanted for yourself or for your own kids. That's how it works and it is high time that we politically come of age.
