Conyers Explains Why He Hasn't Impeached

The final plea was: "Why not try? What do you have to lose?" Impeachments, however, both successful and unsuccessful, have precedential consequences – they set standards for future presidential behavior. The House Judiciary Committee's rejection of an article of impeachment against President Nixon for failing to file tax returns, for example, was used as precedent in acquitting President Clinton for impeachment based on personal misdeeds.

Maybe there's a better example to make Conyers' point, because I agree with both of those outcomes. I think a good precedent was set, and that perhaps it was not so much a modern precedent as the original and obvious basis for impeachment. But where Conyers really loses me is in the assumption that failures to impeach do NOT have consequences. Conyers is looking at the small picture. He sees consequences for future impeachments in how impeachments are handled. I see consequences for future wars and abuses of power in whether impeachments are handled.

Conyers continues:

While some of the difficulty in garnering support for impeachment results from fatigue over the recent and unjustified impeachment of President Clinton, and concern about routinizing what should be an extraordinary constitutional event – whatever the reason, an impeachment vote in the House was certain to fail.

That's a horrible reason and an unjustified prediction. An abuse of the impeachment power is simply no justification for required use of the same power. The founders Conyers cited above did not expect impeachment to be extraordinary, and it should not be any more extraordinary than are impeachable offenses. Predicting failure in this case was not crazy, but by no means justified. Success was entirely possible (and still is, before or after Bush and Cheney leave office). Moreover, this refusal to promote something likely to fail is coming from a man who every Congress, including the one that has just begun, introduces a bill to study reparations for slavery. In fact, I think it is safe to say that most of the bills Conyers introduces or signs onto and actively promotes are deemed guaranteed failures by the Washington establishment. And yet we need reparations for slavery. We need single-payer health care. Conyers is doing his job by promoting such things, and indeed they may succeed.

Conyers adds this:

What, then, would be the precedent set by a House vote against the impeachment of President Bush or Vice President Cheney for deceiving our nation into war, allowing torture, engaging in warrantless domestic surveillance, and retaliating against those who attempted to reveal the truth about these acts? In my view, a failed impeachment – by an almost certainly lopsided vote – would have grossly lowered the bar for presidential behavior and caused great damage to our Constitution. More immediately, a failure to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney would have been trumpeted by their allies as a vindication for them and for their overreaching policies. To all of us who treasure our constitutional form of government and our standing in the world, and mourn the loss of life in a war built on deception, I know the failure to impeach is a deeply unsatisfying outcome. As one who has participated in more impeachments than any other Member of Congress, I came to the realization that this is the reality of this moment in history. Faced with that reality, I had a choice: do nothing; or redouble my efforts to peel away the secrecy of this Administration, expose its wrongdoing, and protect the liberties and freedoms of the American people. I chose the latter course.

This is based on the false claim that failure was guaranteed. We had polls showing majority support with nothing happening in Congress or on the news. We had one pollster finding majority support and another refusing to poll on it because it wasn't in the news. Imagine where the support would have gone with Conyers' leadership! But suppose for the sake of argument that failure was guaranteed. Would an attempted impeachment not have sent more of a warning to future presidents than doing nothing at all? Didn't the senate acquit Clinton and didn't we still see Al Gore try to run for president pretending he had never met his boss? Again, Conyers is taking a narrow view. He would have had to be the man who led a failed impeachment. Never mind that the world would have honored his attempt. His colleagues would have seen a failure. And he would have been at odds with his party and perhaps been stripped of his chairmanship. These probably look like big significant things to Conyers. To the rest of us, a failed impeachment in 2007 or 2008 would have provided us with an ideal list of whom to reelect and whom to toss out on their ears in order to make impeachment happen in 2009.

Conyers goes on in his Foreword to enumerate his many reports and announcements, investigations, hearings, lawsuits, etc. Conyers opened a hearing on impeachment (but not really on impeachment) this past July by bragging about all the hearings he'd held. To him, these hearings and reports are, to some degree, ends in themselves. Actual substantive steps that impact people's lives can get lost in the shuffle. One such step would be impeachment, which could happen right now if Conyers wanted it to. Another step would be Conyers' clear and active support for a special prosecutor.

While prosecution of Bush and Cheney would be hard-pressed to fail, and politicians who supported it would be hard-pressed not to rise in popularity, Cheney has given us a preview of his legal defense: "We were never impeached."

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