John Conyers and the Constitutional Clock

[Report says Monica Conyers made threat: An aide to Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick filed a police report Thursday claiming Monica Conyers, the short-tempered City Council president pro tem and wife of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, threatened to get a gun and shoot him at a city pension board meeting. But a spokesman for Conyers says she was the real victim in the hubbub.

According to the police report filed Thursday by DeDan Milton, an assistant to Kilpatrick, Conyers "threatened to shoot (Milton) with her gun" and made "several aggressive movements" toward Milton "in a threatening manner."]

Bob Barr, former U.S. rep from Georgia, told Conyers and the House Judiciary Committee earlier today that we face a “Constitutional clock” in this country and that clock is counting down. Conyers and his aides smiled as Barr warned that we are about to lose the republic, probably forever. But then, as Barr is the presidential candidate for the Libertarian party, no doubt the entrenched statists of Conyers ilk do not take him seriously, in fact consider him little more than a momentary amusement in the larger circus sideshow that the very serious matter of impeachment has become.

From the outset, Conyers and the Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, where Barr served as a Republican from 1995 until 2003, have done all they can to make sure the judiciary committee hearing, ironically entitled “Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations,” result anything but an impeachment hearing. It is completely understandable why — because the reputations of Conyers, Pelsoi, and the Democrats are not only on the line, they also stand to be criminally indicted along with Bush and his perfidious neocons. Democrats are up to their eyeballs in criminality.

“In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk,” the Washington Post reported last December. “With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).”

In other words, if Bush and the neocons go down, so will the Democrats, thus Conyers’ reluctance to make the “Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations” hearing anything but a sideshow, a charade, a way to placate the opposition and squander any political capital accumulated by Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

“If you know there is treason going on, you can be held accountable for treason yourself,” Minnesota We Are Change reminded Conyers last year during a videotaped confrontation, a clip included in Alex Jones’ documentary, The 9/11 Chronicles: Part One, Truth Rising. Indeed, Mr. Conyers is well aware of the treason going on and he is obviously attempting to protect his colleagues and derail a sincere investigation by holding a milquetoast hearing that will terminate in a dead end.

“The House Democratic leadership, not interested in a bloody impeachment battle in the last year of Bush’s presidency, steered Kucinich’s resolutions to the Judiciary Committee where they could quietly fade away, but Friday’s hearing gave Kucinich and his allies an opportunity to air their views,” explained Jim Abrams for the Associated Press. In order to put the desired spin on the hearing, Abrams concluded his article by quoting George Mason University School of Law professor Jeremy Rabkin, who said: “The tone of these deliberations is slightly demented. You should all remind yourselves that the rest of the country is not necessarily in this same bubble in which people think it is reasonable to describe the president as if he were Caligula.”

Rabkin has a point. Indeed, the rest of the country is not in the same “bubble” as those of us outraged by the outright subversion of the Constitution and the wholesale trashing of the Bill of Rights. It is not an exaggeration to say far too many Americans are not only unaware of the constitutional crisis underway, they in fact have little comprehension of the Constitution, thanks to the corporate media and public education.

A suggestion offered by Rep. Adam Schiff is commendable, although too late. Schiff proposed the formation of a modern-day Church Committee to start an inquiry, independent of the administration. However, it is no longer the 1970s and there are few people in the Congress with the stomach to participate, let alone support such an investigation. In 2008, the rot and corruption has overtaken the whole of the government. At this point, it needs to be excised like a malignant tumor.

Bob Barr is incorrect. The “Constitutional clock” is not ticking away. It in fact passed zero hour some time ago and has stopped ticking altogether. Conyers’ big tent circus sideshow is nothing short of a big fat period under an exclamation point — the Constitution is a dead letter, the Bill of Rights is moribund, and we live in a dictatorship. At present, we exist in a state of limbo, still hearing the echo of liberty as it rapidly fades. It is only a matter of time now before the jack booted thugs come for us — or those of us who understand the descending peril and voice our collective opposition.

But that’s what PDD51, the Military Commissions Act, the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, and those Halliburton constructed camps are all about.

Kurt Nimmo