Impeachment Watch XVIJohn Conyers
expresses surprise that anybody would think he'd hold impeachment hearings without first holding evidentiary hearings:
But none of these allegations can be proved or disproved until the administration answers questions. For example, to know whether intelligence was mistaken or manipulated in the run-up to the Iraq war, we need to know what information was made available to -- and actually read by -- decision makers and how views contradicting the case for war were treated.The committee's job would be to obtain answers -- finally. At the end of the process, if -- and only if -- the select committee, acting on a bipartisan basis, finds evidence of potentially impeachable offenses, it would forward that information to the Judiciary Committee. This threshold of bipartisanship is appropriate, I believe, when dealing with an issue of this magnitude.Just enough reassurance for the moderates and just enough red meat for the partisans.
Carol Platt Liebau points out that
Conyers has changed his tune suddenly.
Bombtruck, the new member
of the Ankle-Biters, notes that Conyers isn't fooling anybody who's been paying attention. He also points
to this artice from last summer:
Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along.
The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes -- and that a British memo on "fixed" intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session.John Hawkins:
What he really means here is that they won't start the impeachment hearings the moment they get into power. Instead, they'll do some partisan investigations first -- and then trump up whatever charges they think have the best chance of succeeding.Blue Crab Boulevard's title points out how you can tell
Conyers is lying.
Hat Tip:
Memeorandum
