Friday,
May 13 2005
JOHN CONYERS: UBIQUITOUS DEMAGOGUE (PART I): The
other day I stumbled across this
rather remarkable interview with Rep. John Conyers where he
extolled the virtues of the filibuster:
"For
200 years, the Senate has used the filibuster to protect the
rights of the minority in Congress and prevent intensely divisive
legislation from passing."
Divisive
legislation like the Civil Rights Act? Here's a piece of irony:
Conyers was elected
to Congress in November 1964, just five months after members
of his own party used the filibuster to tie
up the Senate for 57 days in an effort to prevent passage
of that historic piece of legislation.
There's more.
In the interview, after calling Republicans "irresponsible"
for suggesting Democrats are using the filibuster to keep judges
of faith off the bench, Conyers turns right around and accuses
Republicans of using filibuster-like tactics during the Clinton
administration to keep women and blacks off the bench:
President
Clinton's nominees faced a far different fate at the hands of
these same senators, who used the tactics that they today propose
to abandon...
The
heaviest weight of these tactics fell on women and minorities.
By the close of 1999, every nominee who was subjected to obstructionist
hurdles, such as multiple Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings,
was a woman or person of color.
It's hard
not to admire the simplicity of Conyers' strategy: ignore history
and play the race card whenever possible.
JOHN
CONYERS: UBIQUITOUS DEMAGOGUE (PART II): The Congressman
from Michigan also popped
up over at Arianna Huffington's joint yesterday challenging
Byron York to rebut the charges of voter "irregularities"
Conyers allegedly found in Ohio after the 2004 election (they're
laid out detail in this
102-page report).
I
wrote about what a sham the Conyers hearings were back in
December. They seemed more like a Moveon.org rally than a serious
investigation of fact. Anyway, I was ready to step in for York
and take Conyers' challenge when I came across this post over
at Jackson's
Junction that pretty much did the job for me (via the all-seeing
Michelle
Malkin).
The only
thing I would add is this: you can usually make informed judgments
about the veracity of someone's argument based on the truthfulness
with which they treat the facts and data used to support that
argument. With that in mind, here is a passage from page 12 of
the Conyers report:
The
events surrounding the Presidential election in Ohio must be
viewed in two important contexts. First, there is the 2000 Election
debacle in Florida. In that election, advocates for a full and
fair count were asked to “move on” after Vice President
Al Gore conceded the election to then- Governor George W. Bush.
Months later, it was found that a full and fair count
would have resulted in Gore, not Bush, being elected the Forty-third
President of the United States.9 Subsequent
investigations also uncovered rampant disenfranchisement in
Florida, particularly of African-American voters.10
(emphasis added)
The first
statement is a flat-out lie. A detailed
review of all 64,248 "undercounted" ballots in Florida's
67 counties conducted after the 2000 election by USA Today
and The Miami Herald concluded that under any counting
method used (hanging chad, dimpled chad, pregnant chad, etc) George
W. Bush would have ended up with more votes in Florida in than
Al Gore. Conyers' hides this lie under a very official-looking
footnote which, quite tellingly, doesn't cite a news report but
an article by Hendrik Hertzberg that ran in The New Yorker.
(CORRECTION: There were four different standards for counting
undervotes reviewed in Florida. According to two separate analyses,
Bush would have come out the winner using
three out of the four standards. According to the original
article I referenced, under the most stringent standard Gore would
have ended up with a three vote lead. So my original statement
that Bush would have won under any standard used is incorrect.
Therefore, while it's probably unfair to characterize Conyers'
statement categorically as a "flat-out lie," the fact
remains it was a gross and willful distortion of the evidence.)
The claim
of African-American disenfranchisement in Florida is equally bogus.
The source of the charge is the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission report pushed through by notorious
left-wing Democrat, Chairman Mary Frances Berry. Berry ran a set
of hearings Florida after the 2000 election that were so shamelessly
partisan they made Conyers' effort last year seem tame by comparison.
The resulting report was so outrageous it was immediately discredited
by two members of the commission itself who wrote
this blistering dissent:
The
Commission’s report has little basis in fact. Its conclusions
are based on a deeply flawed statistical analysis coupled with
anecdotal evidence of limited value, unverified by a proper
factual investigation. This shaky foundation is used to justify
charges of the most serious nature—questioning the legitimacy
of the American electoral process and the validity of the most
recent presidential election. The report’s central finding—that
there was “widespread disenfranchisement and denial of
voting rights” in Florida’s 2000 presidential election—does
not withstand even a cursory legal or scholarly scrutiny. Leveling
such a serious charge without clear justification is an unwarranted
assault upon the public’s confidence in American democracy.
To my knowledge
not a single credible study has been done proving there was, in
Conyers' words, "rampant disenfranchisement" of African-American
voters in Florida.
There are
legitimate discussions to be had about whether more can be done
to address disparities in our electoral system that might adversely
impact African-American voters all across the country (like ballot
access, better equipment and better trained staff at polling places,
more voter education, etc). But by focusing exclusively on Ohio,
by trumping up various snafus that occured on election day and
weaving them into nefarious conspiracy theories, and by basing
it all on bogus and divisive claims from 2000, John Conyers is
not doing a single thing to address issues that might help strengthen
our democracy. In fact he's doing just the opposite. -
T. Bevan 11:15am Link | Email
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