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
Born in Detroit in May 1929, 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 largest Arab-American community), and all of Hamtramck. This district has an electorate that is 61 percent black. Conyers chairs the powerful House Judiciary Committee and sits on several subcommittees.
Conyers worked from 1959 to 1961 as a legislative assistant to Detroit congressman John Dingell, and from 1961 to 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. Since then, he has been re-elected every two years; he is the second most senior member of the House of Representatives.
Conyers belongs to the Progressive Caucus, and in 1969 he was one of 13 co-founders of the Congressional Black Caucus. His voting record, according to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), tilts left between 90 and 100 percent of the time. In 2002 the National Journal ranked him as the most "liberal" member of the House of Representatives. For an overview of Conyers' votes on a variety of key issues, click here.
Conyers today is the most prominent lawmaker lobbying to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted murderer of a Philadelphia police officer.
Conyers has deliberately designed legislation to treat citizens of different skin colors differently. One such law requires police officers to keep statistics on the race of people they question or arrest in order to discourage "racial profiling" of minorities.
Conyers has authored a bill to study the economic harm suffered by descendants of slaves; his ultimate objective is to lay the groundwork for trillions of dollars in reparations to be given by U.S. taxpayers to black Americans.
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. That legislation also has contributed heavily to voter-registration fraud.
In the 1980s Conyers strongly supported the Nicaraguan Sandinista dictatorship, writing in a March 7, 1986 letter published in the New York Times:backed by those Marxist powers. "There is more freedom and less brutality in revolutionary Nicaragua than in Central American countries supported by the [Reagan] Administration."
Conyers has long favored reducing or ending U.S. economic sanctions and travel restrictions against Fidel Castro’s Cuba, for whose Marxist regime Conyers in 1997 helped arrange an opportunity to lobby Congress in lawmaker offices on Capitol Hill.
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 had killed more than 600 civilians, including several Americans.
In January 2003 Conyers 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.
Two months later, Conyers privately convened and invited other members of Congress to a gathering that featured Ramsey Clark 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. Two decades earlier, Conyers had likewise proposed impeaching President Ronald Reagan.
In May 2005, Conyers published What Went Wrong In Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election. Citing statistical incongruities between exit-poll results and actual votes registered, and alleging that many of the state’s electronic voting machines were faulty, this screed cast doubt on the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s electoral victory. Conyers was one of 31 House members who held that Ohio’s electoral votes should not be counted in the final tally.
On June 16, 2005, Conyers scheduled a media event to deliver to the Bush White House what he described as "over 540,000 signatures from Americans demanding a response from the Administration to the charges [that the U.S. and Britain tampered with intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs] set forth" in the so-called Downing Street Memo. Conyers publicized his efforts via a carefully orchestrated schedule of pre-arranged interviews with such media outlets as CNN, National Public Radio, and Air America Radio (most notably on programs hosted by Al Franken and Amy Goodman). Conyers also acknowledged the strong support his signature campaign had received from such weblogs as Raw Story, BradBlog, DailyKos, Democratic Underground, Progressive Democrats of America, andMoveon.org.
In May 2005 Conyers became a regular contributor to Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post. He also frequently posts at the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground.
Conyers is a longtime ally of ACORN. In the fall of 2008, he said that ACORN was “a long-standing and well-regarded organization that fights for the poor and working class.” ACORN gave Conyers a 100 percent rating on its 2006 legislative scorecard, and in the summer of 2008 the congressman received enthusiastic applause as he addressed the group’s national convention in Detroit and denounced U.S. corporations as “capitalist predators.”
In June 2009, Conyers' wife Monica, a Detroit City Council member, pleaded guilty to felony bribery charges.
In a July 2009 speech at a National Press Club luncheon, Conyers suggested that it was unimportant whether or not legislators read the 2,000-page health-care bill that was then being debated by Congress. Said Conyers: “I love these members [of Congress], they get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”
