John Conyers is not an "icon," as Nancy Pelosi would have it, or would pretend to have it anyway, unless you mean an icon for everything that went wrong with the civil rights movement.
He's also an icon for identity politics (a favorite of despots globally), grievance culture and economic decline (Detroit). Oh, and there are the little matters of sexual assault and governmental corruption.
Finally, he's an icon for rape -- in this instance, of the American taxpayer.
Am I being harsh on poor John at 88?
Unfortunately, not much. How about your money paying -- in secret -- for his sexual (to be overly polite) dalliance(s)?
On Monday night, BuzzFeed broke the story that Michigan Rep. John Conyers paid a former staffer thousands of dollars in a settlement in 2015 after sexually harassing her and other women in his office and then firing her for refusing his advances.He likely isn’t the only member of Congress to settle a harassment case. Since 1997, Congress has paid at least $15 million to settle complaints about sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act under the umbrella of the Congressional Accountability Act (CAA) of 1995.The payments made to Rep. Conyers’s alleged victim came out of his taxpayer-funded office budget. Generally, though, these payments aren’t made by members of Congress or their offices. They’re made by a special section of the Department of the Treasury established under Section 415 of the CAA — and ultimately by the American taxpayer.
None of this should be a surprise. It's all in the family. Conyers' recently divorced (2015) wife Monica pled guilty for "conspiring to commit bribery" (2009), and was involved in numerous scandals during the twenty-five years of their marriage. (She served twenty-seven months in a West Virginia prison camp.) The decades of dubious activities by the Conyers have been well-known throughout Michigan and to many people across the country who follow politics -- including, one would assume, John Conyers' colleagues in Congress.
The real question: How did such a person remain in office for so many years and then become ranking member, until now, of the Judiciary Committee, of all things? It sounds almost like the UN.
The answer, my friends, is a bleak passage indeed, especially bad for African-Americans who were disastrously misled by people like Conyers from the time he and others formed the Congressional Black Caucus. Although they may not have realized it then, the formation of that caucus marked what was the ratification of a grievance culture, what Larry Elder so aptly calls "victimology." The Black Caucus, racist in essence as would be a White Caucus, allowed many things to be excused in the name of the supposed racial advancement of African-Americans.
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