Republicans probably wish they could get John Conyers to write an op-ed in a major paper every week from now until Election Day. Instead of having the desired effect of defusing fears that Democrats will lead the charge to impeach Bush if they win control of the House in November, Conyers' op-ed generated lots of chatter - most of it serving to remind people just how nutty, self-indulgent, and relentlessly partisan he is.

Thomas Bray touched on this in a RealClearPolitics column last week:

Last June Conyers commandeered a basement conference room in the Capitol to stage a mock hearing into impeachment charges over the Iraq war. "[Conyers] banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him 'Mr. Chairman,'" recounted Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank. "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.'"

"As luck would have it," Milbank wryly noted, "all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes....Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session. 'At the next hearing,' [Conyers] told his colleagues, 'we could use a little subpoena power.' That brought the house down."

Conyers also orchestrated the "unofficial" hearings into "voter irregularities" in Ohio after the 2004 elections, featuring sober and judicious testimony from the likes of Jesse Jackson, Sheila Jackson Lee and some guy from Air America radio. Conyers opened the hearings on Wednesday, December 8 - five weeks after the country had officially rendered its verdict - by notably declaring in the present tense: "I very much want John Kerry to be the next President of the United States." As I wrote at the time:

This is partisan political theatre of the worst sort designed to undermine the integrity of the process. This is a group of Democrats, in the wake of losing another bitter election, taking the myriad of imperfections inherent in our process and blowing them up, stringing them together and assigning heinous motives of conspiracy and racial oppression.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, they do all of this using the self-righteous, morally superior credo that they want to "count every vote." Except they're only interested in counting "all the votes" in Ohio, because that is the only state in America where the outcome of the Presidential election could possibly be altered.

Conyers has been working to try and undo the 2004 election since the day it happened. I find it hard to believe he'll be able to resist the urge to give it another go if he gets subpoena power and the Judiciary Committee Chairmanship this November.