- Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
- Member of the radical Progressive Caucus
- One of 13 founders of Congressional Black Caucus
- Advocates freeing convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal
- Plotted with radical Ramsey Clark and others about ways to impeach President George W. Bush
- Spoke in 2003 at anti-Iraq War rally of pro-North Korean Marxist group International A.N.S.W.E.R.
- Voted against a resolution stating that “the United States and Israel are now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism.”
- His district has a higher proportion of Muslims than any other in Congress, and his official congressional web site can be read in Arabic
- Spoke in 2005 at an event organized by accused anti-Semite Lyndon LaRouche
- Orchestrated letter-writing and media campaign over so-called Downing Street Memo with help from George Soros-funded MoveOn.org
John Conyers, Jr. is a Democratic Member of Congress who represents the 14th District of Michigan, which includes roughly half of Detroit, most of Dearborn with America’s biggest Arab-American community, and all of once-Polish-American Hamtramck.
This district, slightly redrawn since the 2000 Census, has had an electorate 61 percent African-American and in 2000 cast 81 percent of its votes for Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore. In 2004 Conyers won re-election with 84 percent of the vote, approximately 11 percent more than Democratic standard bearer Senator John F. Kerry drew here in Wayne County.
John Conyers, Jr. was born in Detroit in 1929, five months before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression. He was the first of five children born to a factory auto painter who soon became a leftwing organizer for the United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the first labor unions to organize black workers. The UAW, begun in 1935, was a union dedicated to class warfare by its radical parent the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), later merged into the AFL-CIO.
In 1943, 14-year-old Conyers witnessed a race riot in Detroit. “Every black man considered every white man his mortal enemy, and vice-versa,” Conyers is quoted recalling this riot in Richard Bruner’s 1971 book Black Politicians (New York: David McKay). “It operated on a very personal, animalistic level; they were reduced to trying to destroy each other. People were being pulled off street cars and literally beaten to death right out in public. It was a form of insanity.”
After high school, Conyers worked briefly at a Lincoln Motors factory, went to night school, trained to be a civil engineer, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1951 and served a year in Korea as a Second Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. After discharge in 1954, he used veteran benefits for college. While attending local Wayne State University Conyers became involved in politics, narrowly winning election to the local Democratic Party’s organizing committee. He completed his BA degree in 1957, a doctorate in jurisprudence at Wayne State in 1958, and became a lawyer by passing the Michigan Bar Exam in 1959.
Conyers worked as legislative assistant to young Detroit Congressman John Dingell from 1959 to 1961, and from 1961 until 1964 as a politically-appointed referee of the Michigan Workmen’s Compensation Department.
In 1964 Conyers ran for Congress, winning the Democratic Primary by 44 votes and the general election in a Democrat-gerrymandered district by more than 110,000 votes. Conyers since then has been in Congress for more than four decades, making him the second most senior member of the House of Representatives. The most senior is his mentor Dingell.
Congressman Conyers belongs to the radical Progressive Caucus, and in 1969 he was one of 13 co-founders of the Congressional Black Caucus in the House of Representatives. His voting record, according to the progressive Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tilts left between 90 and 100 percent of the time. According to the 2002 rankings of the National Journal Conyers is the most “liberal” member of the House of Representatives.
Conyers is the most prominent lawmaker lobbying to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted murderer of a Philadelphia police officer. Conyers has been a National Executive Board member of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which was created as a Soviet front and still embraces its Communist heritage. In a June 1, 1979 New York Times opinion piece he co-authored with Marcus Raskin, co-founder of the extreme leftwing think tank the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Conyers asserted that “government’s responsibility is to revitalize the nation’s economy through creative forms of public ownership” – in other words, through socialism.
Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks worked on Conyers’ 1964 campaign and was employed for more than two decades in his Detroit office. But unlike Parks, who committed civil disobedience to change society by refusing to sit in the back of a segregated public bus, Conyers has deliberately designed laws to treat citizens of different races differently and to impose obedience to policies of reverse racism. One such Conyers law requires police to keep statistics on the race of people they question or arrest in to order to discourage “racial profiling” of minorities, a law that also makes police more reluctant to question or arrest minority citizens even when such actions are warranted.
Conyers helped enact “hate crime” laws, which critics have described as punishing people for “thought crimes” and politically-incorrect speech. These laws in practice are often applied unequally. If a white hits a black, big city prosecutors frequently add hate crime charges to impose a heavier criminal penalty. If a black hits a white, such prosecutors seldom add charges involving hate crime statutes.
Conyers has authored a bill to study the economic harm done to descendants of slaves, the results of which research will lay the basis for demanding that potentially trillions of dollars in reparations be paid by American taxpayers to black Americans. None of today’s taxpayers have legally held slaves in America, and none of the potential recipients of such reparations have ever been slaves, slavery having been abolished in the U.S. in 1865. But as Fabian socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, he who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul’s support.
For a radical like Conyers, such racially-polarizing issues are win-win propositions. They encourage minorities to regard themselves as victims and to regard white America as their victimizer. If reparations are paid to every African-American, Conyers can take credit for the largesse. If reparations are not paid, Conyers can denounce this as racism and use the issue to stir resentment and to justify more political transfer of wealth to minorities via other means such as welfare and racial preferences.
Conyers describes as one of his “major accomplishments” the “Motor Voter Bill of 1993,” which facilitates the voter registration of all who apply for a state driver’s license or for welfare or other government benefits. Conyers’ legislation also impeded the removal of potentially fraudulent names from local voter rolls.
Conyers has joined fellow Black Caucus (and former Progressive Caucus) member Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-New York) in supporting renewed military conscription, arguing that the volunteer military disproportionately enlists the poor and minorities. This puts Conyers in the odd positions of being a pro-draft-but-anti-war activist as well as a reparations-for-slavery advocate who favors involuntary servitude.
Like most leftwing Democrats, Conyers voted against the use of force in Iraq but also against permitting oil drilling by union workers on a scant 20 acres of the 1.2 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), thus voting to keep America dependent on Middle Eastern oil while opposing efforts to make that region politically democratic and stable.
But Conyers went farther. In January 2003 he was the only member of Congress to speak before, and lend his prestige to, an anti-war rally organized by the Marxist-Leninist, pro-North Korean front group International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Rep. Rangel also addressed the rally but not in person – via a letter read by another speaker.) Conyers embraced his comrades in this group with the same enthusiasm and support he gave during the Cold War to the Soviet-backed World Peace Council.
He co-sponsored, and persuaded many other members of the Progressive Caucus to sign, a letter pressing President Bill Clinton to “delink” economic from military sanctions against Saddam Hussein. This letter, which was aimed at ending economic sanctions against the Iraqi dictator, supported Hussein’s propaganda depicting American and British-backed sanctions as the main cause of disease and infant death in Iraq. In fact, the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program was generating billions of dollars to help the Iraqi people – but much of this money was being siphoned off by Hussein for weapons and palaces, and by U.N. officials and political figures in nations such as France who were on Hussein’s then-secret payroll.
In May 2002 Conyers was one of 17 House Democrats who voted against a Resolution (HR 392) expressing support for Israel as it faced terrorist attacks that killed more than 600 civilians, including several Americans. The resolution stated that “the United States and Israel are now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism.” Whether Conyers voted against this resolution because he represents more Arab-Americans than any other Member of Congress, or because radical American Muslim groups lobbied against it, or because many leftwing radicals like himself now support the Palestinians who refuse to make peace with the Jewish State, Conyers did not say.
In 2001 the United States withdrew most of its diplomatic participation in the United Nations’ World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia And Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa after it became clear that the gathering would give prominence not only to anti-American but also to anti-Israel and anti-Semitic leaders. Despite this, several leftwing Americans including Congressman Conyers and six other congressional Democrats attended and lent their prestige to what became an anti-Jewish hatefest.
Congressman Conyers has also long favored reducing or ending U.S. economic sanctions and travel restrictions against Cuba, for whose Marxist regime Conyers in 1997 helped arrange an opportunity to lobby Congress in lawmaker offices on Capitol Hill. But Conyers has not always opposed such sanctions, even when they imposed hardship on the poor in targeted nations. In 1972 he joined then-Congressman Ron Dellums from Berkeley, California, in co-sponsoring legislation to impose harsh economic sanctions against white-ruled Apartheid South Africa.
“When we introduced the bill to bring sanctions and disinvestment of American corporations in South Africa,” said Dellums in a 1998 PBS interview, “it was a Berkeley, Commie, Pinko, Socialist idea, but later on it became an idea that people all over the country embraced because they understood it.” Apparently sanctions in Conyers’ view are fine when used to bring down a white racist regime in South Africa – but not when used to weaken the red racist regime of Fidel Castro or the Ba’athist socialist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
When Castro and his Soviet allies attempted to take over Central America during the 1980s, Conyers strongly supported the Nicaraguan Sandinista dictatorship backed by those Marxist powers. “There is more freedom and less brutality in revolutionary Nicaragua,” wrote Conyers in a letter published in the March 7, 1986 New York Times, “than in Central American countries supported by the [Ronald Reagan] Administration.” Conyers signed a fund-raising letter for the organization Medical Aid to El Salvador that channeled medical supplies to groups and regions controlled by Cuban-backed Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) terrorist guerrillas.
On March 11, 2003 Congressman Conyers privately convened and invited other members of Congress to a gathering that featured former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, now associated with the Communist front organization International A.N.S.W.E.R., and more than two dozen leftist attorneys and legal scholars. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss how to impeach President George W. Bush as a way to prevent military action against Saddam Hussein. When Roll Call magazine two days later reported that the meeting had happened, Conyers staff initially denied it, but a Conyers spokesperson Dena Graziano later confirmed the story and added that no “consensus” had been reached about how to proceed. Two decades earlier Conyers had likewise proposed impeaching President Ronald Reagan.
On June 16, 2005, Conyers scheduled a media event to deliver to the Bush White House what, in his Internet blog, Conyers described as “over 540,000 signatures from Americans demanding a response from the Administration to the charges set forth” in the so-called Downing Street Memo (sometimes also called the Downing Street Minutes).
This memo is a purported internal British Government note dated 23 July 2002 by go-between Matthew Rycroft. Its text was published on May Day 2005 by the Times of London. This memo has been seized on by Conyers and more than 100 other Democratic Members of Congress as evidence that the Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair governments were looking for, and cooking up, reasons to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power.
Was the likelihood of military intervention against Iraq a secret? No, because Saddam Hussein by July 2002 had already defied more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding that he submit to unencumbered inspection for prohibited Weapons of Mass Destruction at all Iraqi potential military and technology sites.
Does this British memo, as Conyers has claimed, show that the Bush and Blair governments believed Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction and that they therefore conspired to lie about this to justify military action? No, the memo explicitly asks what the consequences would be “if Saddam used WMD on day one” of a potential U.S.-British military action – which confirms that Bush and Blair were convinced that Hussein had such weapons. But Conyers and his cohorts somehow neglect to mention this and other evidence in the memo that disproves their own partisan conspiracy theories.
The June 2005 Conyers media event designed to push his latest attempt to undermine the Bush Administration’s War on Terrorism was carefully orchestrated. It included pre-arranged interviews with Cable News Network (CNN), the Democrat-funded Air America Radio network with its star Al Franken, taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR), radical Amy Goodman on her show Democracy Now! and other left-liberal establishment media.
How did Conyers obtain 540,000 “signatures” of citizens assailing President Bush over this British memo? On June 1, 2005 Conyers wrote to his supporters on his blog that “the story dies without blogs like Raw Story, BradBlog, DailyKos, Democratic Underground, Progressive Democrats of America and others. The blogosphere has put us well on our way to over 100,000 Americans willing to ask the president to respond to the leaked Memo by signing my open letter to Bush.” The gathering of these signatures, in other words, was a concerted campaign involving the cadres of several of America’s most extreme left-wing Internet blogs.
“This [Memo] story,” wrote Conyers, “should not be allowed to fall down the memory hole during wall-to-wall coverage of the Michael Jackson trial and a runaway bride,” as he worked zealously to keep it alive and growing.
On June 9, 2005, Conyers wrote to supporters on his blog: “Today, I am pleased to announce that Moveon.org [sic], one of the pioneers in internet activism has joined our drive to demonstrate that the stonewalling of the White House on the Downing Street Minutes will not stand. We deserve answers and we deserve them now. Given Moveon's involvement, I think we can go for half a million signatures, don't you?”
MoveOn.org is far more than just another leftwing web site. MoveOn.org is heavily funded by, among others, the eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros who spent at least $27 million to defeat President Bush in the 2003-04 election cycle. Soros has said that President Bush made the United States “too strong” in the world, and that Soros sought to oust President Bush to reduce American power to be more on a par with Germany or France.
Operating with the money of Soros and other wealthy leftists, the head of MoveOn.org’s Political Action Committee following the 2004 election boasted that “we bought it, we paid for it, we own the Democratic Party.” MoveOn.org is one of the “seven sisters” of the Soros-funded “Shadow Party” now busy taking control of the Democratic Party and much of the rest of the left side of America’s political spectrum. MoveOn.org and Soros have put their backing behind Conyers’ attempt to turn a British memo into a Bush memogate scandal.
Why are Conyers and his fellow left-liberal Democrats eager to wage campaigns to impeach President Bush or to smear him with a scandal as flimsy as the Downing Street Memo? In Conyers’ case such tactics can pay many dividends. Such issues divert public attention from the Democrats’ lack of any credible positive plan for defeating terrorism or solving social problems. Conyers’ issues have the potential to put Republicans on the defensive or at least waste their time and resources, and to provide a rallying point for leftists and Islamists worldwide who are eager to undermine and discredit the war on terrorism and the President leading it. The Michigan district Conyers represents has been gerrymandered to include far more Democrats than Republicans, and far more Muslims than Jews.
In 2004 Conyers was one of the few congressmen prominently featured and positively portrayed in left filmmaker Michael Moore’s pseudo-documentary Fahrenheit 9-11. In May 2005 Conyers became a regular contributor to “progressive” columnist Arianna Huffington’s webzine of blogs The Huffington Post.
On March 23, 2005 Conyers spoke at a Lyndon LaRouche event in Detroit. LaRouche, a former Socialist Workers Party (SWP) organizer and follower of Marxist Leon Trotsky, co-founder of the Soviet Union, later embraced conspiracy theories and held at various times that the world was secretly controlled by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, British bankers, Israel or the Trilateral Commission. The Anti-Defamation League has described LaRouche as an anti-Semite.
LaRouche, now in his eighties, is also a perennial presidential candidate who made his 8th run for the Oval Office in 2004. In 2000, running as a Democrat, LaRouche won 22 percent of Arkansas’ primary votes against Al Gore but was denied any delegates at the Democratic National Convention because the Democratic National Committee ruled he was “not a real Democrat.” In December 2004, according to one account, Conyers “invited LaRouche’s group to present political testimony of alleged GOP voter suppression before an unofficial panel he chaired.”
(These deceptive Conyers “Hearings” have been published as a paperback book the Congressman gives to those who contribute $50 to his campaign coffers. This book, titled What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election, was published by Academy Chicago Publishers “more as a public service than a money making venture,” said Conyers on his blog. If so, does this make publication of this book a potentially-illegal campaign contribution? The book, adds Conyers, “has an amazing forward [sic] by Gore Vidal.”)
It strains credibility for a powerful and sophisticated Democratic leader such as Conyers to claim no knowledge of who and what Lyndon LaRouche is. This, however, is what Conyers’ staff did when reporters, in response to an internet story, began asking about the Congressman’s links to this controversial figure accused of anti-Semitism.
Confronted with several of LaRouche’s statements about Jews, a member of Conyers’ staff told one journalist: “After finding your post, we went to your suggested links and pulled up the LaRouche quotes that were, to say the least, antisemitic and racist. We brought them to Mr. Conyers attention. He was shocked and surprised. On his behalf: he unequivocally condemns these statements, and he will not speak before any group he knows to be associated with LaRouche unless they renounce these views. If he knew about these sickening quotes, he would not have spoken before the group.”
But on stage at the LaRouche event, flanked by the Midwest coordinator of the LaRouche Political Action Committee (sponsor of the event) and a leader of the LaRouche Youth Movement, Conyers according to one source had told the audience that he wanted to help them "take these [LaRouche] arguments, the book [LaRouche's Draft Democratic Party Platform], the weekly newsletter, and let's get it out into the debate ... what I would like to do with you, is to begin to debate these issues. I know that they're taken as gospel. But, unless they can stand the test of debate, they're just a great view held by a number of people, who believe one thing. But that's not going to sell it. And so, what I want to do, is, extend the discussion: What we need is discussions about this and where [the Democratic Party is] and where are we going."
Rep. Conyers is the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Judiciary Committee, and he also sits on the Courts, the Internet & Intellectual Property Subcommittee and the Border Security & Claims Subcommittee. If Democrats regain a majority in the House of Representatives, Conyers will become Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and have the power to determine who receives lifetime appointments as federal judges or U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Each of these federal judges and Justices will have the power to reshape American law.
Tied for the title as Conyers’ single biggest campaign contributor is the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA), whose members make much of their money by threatening to sue American businesses. Other big donors include organized labor, which provides nearly 37 percent of his Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions. Almost 60 percent of Conyers’ PAC money comes from businesses and professional groups. Among his largest recent campaign contributors have been AT&T, Time Warner, Echostar Communications, MCI Group, MGM Mirage casino, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and the National Association of Broadcasters. Among his big donors is General Motors but, oddly, not the labor union for which his father was a leftist apparatchik, the United Auto Workers.
In 2003-2004 Conyers received 85.4 percent of his campaign contributions from outside the state and district he represents.
