U.S. House of Representatives
Elections rally in
Madison Square Garden, June 25, 1969 In 1964, Conyers ran for an open seat in what was then the 1st District, and defeated Republican Robert Blackwell with 84% of the vote. He was reelected 13 times with even larger margins. After the
1990 United States census, Michigan lost a congressional district, and there was redistricting. Conyers's district was renumbered as the
14th district. In 1992, Conyers won re-election to his 15th term in his new district, which included western suburbs of Detroit, with 82% of the vote against Republican nominee John Gordon. He won re-election another nine times after that. His worst re-election performance was in
2010, when he got 77% of the vote against Republican nominee
Don Ukrainec. In 2013, his district was renamed as the
13th district. In total, Conyers won re-election twenty-five times and was serving in his twenty-sixth term. He was the
dean of the House as longest-serving current member, the
third longest-serving member of the House in history, and the
sixth longest-serving member of Congress in history. He was the second-longest serving member of either house of Congress in Michigan's history, trailing only his former boss, Dingell. He was also the last member of the large Democratic freshman class of 1964 who was still serving in the House. In May 2014, Wayne County clerk Cathy Garrett determined that Conyers had not submitted enough valid nominating petition signatures to appear on the August 2014 primary election ballot. Two of his workers circulating petitions were not themselves registered voters at the time, which was required under Michigan law. But on May 23, federal district judge Matthew Leitman issued an injunction placing Conyers back on the ballot, ruling that the requirement that circulators be registered voters was similar to an Ohio law which had been found unconstitutional in 2008 by a Federal appeals court. The Michigan secretary of state's office subsequently announced they would not appeal the ruling.
Tenure in 1971 Conyers was one of the 13 founding members of the
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and was considered the Dean of that group. Formed in 1969, the CBC was founded to strengthen African American lawmakers' ability to address the legislative concerns of Black and minority citizens. He served longer in Congress than any other African American. In 1971, he was one of the original members of
Nixon's enemies list. In 1965, Conyers won a seat as a freshman on the influential
Judiciary Committee, which was then chaired by Democratic Congressman
Emanuel Celler of New York. The assignment was considered an elite one, as Judiciary ranked behind only
Ways and Means and
Appropriations in terms of the number of Members who sought assignment there. According to the
National Journal, Conyers has been considered, with
Pete Stark,
John Lewis,
Jim McDermott, and
Barbara Lee, to be one of the most
liberal members of Congress for many years.
Rosa Parks, known for her prominent role in the
Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, moved to Detroit and served on Conyers's staff between 1965 and 1988. Conyers was known to have opposed regulation of
online gambling. He opposed the
Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. After the
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Conyers introduced the first bill in Congress to make King's birthday a federal holiday. In 1983 he joined with 7 other congressional representatives to sponsor a resolution to
impeach Ronald Reagan over his sudden and unexpected
invasion of Grenada. Conyers introduced the "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act" () in January 1989. He re-introduced this bill each congressional term. It calls for establishing a commission to research the
history of
slavery in the United States and its effects on current society, which is to recommend ways to remedy this injustice against African Americans. The current version was introduced and referred to committee on January 3, 2013. Conyers first introduced the proposed resolution in 1989, and has stated his intention to annually propose this act until it is approved and passed. Since 1997, the bill has been designated "H.R. 40", most recently, , alluding to the promise of "
forty acres and a mule". If passed, the commission would explore the longstanding effects of slavery on today's society, politics, and economy. in 1993 Conyers served as the ranking Democratic member on the House Committee on the Judiciary from 1995 to 2007 and again from 2011 to 2017. He served as chairman of that committee from 2007 to 2011 and as chairman of the House Oversight Committee from 1989 to 1995. As the longest-serving current member of Congress, Conyers was the dean of the House of Representatives from 2015 to 2017. In March 2016, Rep. Conyers and Representative
Hank Johnson introduced legislation to protect consumers' access to civil courts. The bill was entitled the "Restoring Statutory Rights Act". Conyers served more than 50 years in Congress, becoming the
sixth-longest serving member of Congress in U.S. history; he was the longest-serving African American member of Congress. By November 2017, Conyers was the last remaining member of Congress who had served since the
presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.
Nixon and Watergate Conyers was critical of President
Richard Nixon during his tenure. He was listed as number 13 on President
Nixon's enemies list during the president's 1969–74 presidential tenure. The president's chief counsel described him as "coming on fast", and said he was "emerging" as a "black anti-Nixon spokesman". Conyers, who voted to
impeach Nixon in July 1974, wrote at the time,
National Health Care Act In 2003, Conyers introduced H.R. 676, the
United States National Health Insurance Act (Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act) with 25 cosponsors and reintroduced it each session since. As of 2015, it had 49 cosponsors. The act calls for the creation of a universal
single-payer health care system in the United States, in which the government would provide every resident health care free of charge. To eliminate disparate treatment between richer and poorer Americans, the Act would prohibit private insurers from covering any treatment or procedure already covered by the Act.
House impeachment manager in Hastings trial Conyers was one of the
House impeachment managers who prosecuted the in case the
impeachment trial of Judge
Alcee Hastings. Hastings was found guilty by the
United States Senate and removed from his federal judgeship.
Downing Street memo On May 5, 2005, Conyers and 88 other members of Congress wrote an open letter to the White House inquiring about the
Downing Street memo. This was a leaked memorandum that revealed an apparent secret agreement between the Bush administration and the
Second Blair ministry to
invade Iraq in 2002.
The Times, among the first to publish news of the leak, wrote that the discovered documented revealed the intentions of Bush and
Blair to invade Iraq, along with revealing that the two had "discussed creating pretextual justifications for doing so." Conyers and others reportedly considered sending a congressional investigation delegation to London.
What Went Wrong in Ohio In May 2005, Conyers released a report about
voting irregularities in the state of
Ohio during the
2004 U.S. presidential election called
What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report On The 2004 Presidential Election. Some of the claims in the report pertaining to
voter suppression tend to have been supported, including through court cases. Some of the claims pertaining to manipulation of the count and similar
election fraud have been refuted. • Too few voting machines in Kerry-voting wards, leading to long queues. A
Washington Post piece exemplified
Franklin County, where wards with many machines per voter mostly had Bush majorities, and wards with relatively few machines per voter were typically in favor of Kerry. The numbers disenfranchised statewide were in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of voters. •
Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell made a decision to limit provisional ballots, leading to the estimated disenfranchisement of tens or hundreds of thousands of voters. • Voter turnout for minorities was suppressed by
caging targeting 35,000 of these voters, and "challenging" tactics were used to intimidate voters and cause longer lines. • Where absentee ballots were not issued in time, provisional ballots were not permitted, affecting thousands or tens of thousands, especially seniors. The order from Ken Blackwell to do this was found illegal by a federal court, violating the
Help America Vote Act. • Improper voter purges and registration errors disenfranchised at least 10,000 voters, likely tens of thousands statewide. • 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, including undervote rates as high as 25% in some counties, from people who likely stood in line. • Statistical abnormalities in the differences between
exit poll results and actual votes registered at those locations. • Issues of faulty
electronic voting machines, such as over 24 electronic machines in
Mahoning County transferring an indeterminate quantity of votes into the Bush column and out of the Kerry column. • In
Warren County, public observers were prevented from viewing the vote counting, due to specious claims that a terrorist threat had been called by the
FBI. The FBI stated it gave no such warnings. • Little-known
third party candidates got twenty times more votes than would be expected in
Cuyahoga County. • Voter turnout of a suspiciously-high 98.55% in
Miami County. • Provisional ballots being rejected due to lack of guidance on how to process. In once case, about 8,000 of the 24,000 provisional ballots were rejected. • Cheat sheets were handed out by a voting machine manufacturer to the election officials, giving guidance on how to avoid doing a hand-recount in the face of anomalies. While some courts before the election found that certain restrictive voting policies of Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell were illegal, claims of voter and machine fraud swaying the election have not achieved mainstream acceptance, and several have been refuted. Conyers was one of 31 members of the House who voted not to count the 20
electoral votes from
Ohio in the
2004 presidential election. The state was won by Republican president George Bush by 118,457 votes.
Constitution in Crisis in Newark, New Jersey, in 2007 On August 4, 2006, Conyers released his report,
The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retributions and Cover-ups in the Iraq War, an edited collection of information intended to serve as evidence that the
Bush administration altered
intelligence to justify the
2003 invasion of Iraq.
The Constitution in Crisis examines much of the evidence presented by the Bush administration prior to the invasion and questions the credibility of their sources of intelligence. In addition, the document investigates conditions that led to the
torture scandal at
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as further evidence of
torture having been committed but not made known to the public. Finally, the document reports on a series of "smear tactics" purportedly used by the administration in dealing with its political adversaries. The document calls for the
censure of President
George W. Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney. Conyers refused to back
impeachment proceedings, however.
On anti-Muslim intolerance Conyers proposed House Resolution 288, which condemns "religious intolerance" and emphasizes
Islam as needing special protection from acts of violence and intolerance. It states that "it should never be official policy of the United States Government to disparage the
Quran, Islam, or any religion in any way, shape, or form," and "calls upon local, State, and Federal authorities to work to prevent
bias-motivated crimes and acts against all individuals, including those of the Islamic faith." The bill was referred to the House subcommittee on the Constitution in June 2005. In 2005, Conyers introduced House Resolution 160, a house resolution that would have condemned the conduct of
Narendra Modi, then the
chief minister of the
State of Gujarat in India. The resolution was cosponsored by Republican representative
Joseph R. Pitts (Republican of Pennsylvania). The resolution's title was: "Condemning the conduct of Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his actions to incite religious persecution and urging the United States to condemn all violations of
religious freedom in India." The resolution cited a 2004
United States Commission on International Religious Freedom report on Modi stating that he was "widely accused of being reluctant to bring the perpetrators of the killings of Muslims and non-Hindus to justice". (See
2002 Gujarat riots.) The resolution was not adopted.
Conyers v. Bush In April 2006 Conyers, together with ten other senior
congressmen, filed an action in the
U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, challenging the constitutionality of the
Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. The complaint alleged the
bill was not afforded due consideration by the
United States Congress before being signed by the President. The action was subsequently dismissed on grounds of lack of
standing.
Copyright bill Conyers repeatedly introduced the
Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, a bill that would overturn the
NIH Public Access Policy, an
open-access mandate of the
National Institutes of Health. Conyers's bill would forbid the government from mandating that federally funded research be made freely available to the public. The legislation was supported by the publishing industry, and opposed by groups such as the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Writers
Lawrence Lessig and
Michael Eisen accused Conyers of being influenced by publishing houses, who have contributed significant money to his campaigns.
House Report on George W. Bush presidency and proposed inquiry On January 13, 2009, the House Committee on the Judiciary, led by Conyers, released
Reining in the Imperial Presidency: Lessons and Recommendations Relating to the Presidency of George W. Bush, a 486-page report detailing alleged abuses of power that occurred during the
Bush administration, and a comprehensive set of recommendations to prevent recurrence. Conyers introduced a bill to set up a "truth commission" panel to investigate alleged policy abuses of the Bush administration.
Bill reading controversy In late July 2009, Conyers, commenting on the
healthcare debate in the
House, stated: "I love these members, 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?" His remark brought criticism from
government transparency advocates such as the
Sunlight Foundation, which referred to readthebill.org in response.
Response to accusations regarding American Muslim spies In October, Conyers responded to allegations from four Republican Congress Members, in the wake of the launch of the book
Muslim Mafia, that the
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) sought to plant Muslim "spies" in
Capitol Hill. He strongly opposed the accusations, saying:
WikiLeaks At a December 16, 2010, hearing of the
House Judiciary Committee on the subject of "the
Espionage Act and the Legal and
Constitutional Issues Raised by
WikiLeaks", Conyers "argue[d] strongly against prosecuting WikiLeaks in hasteor at all." He strongly defended the
whistleblowing organization, saying: Conyers's statement was "in marked contrast to the repeated calls from other members of
Congress and
Obama administration officials to prosecute WikiLeaks head
Julian Assange immediately." Conyers stated, "If there's one simple lesson we can take away from U.S. involvement in conflicts overseas, it's this: Beware of unintended consequences. As was made vividly clear with U.S. involvement in
Afghanistan during
the Soviet invasion decades ago, overzealous military assistance or the hyper-weaponization of conflicts can have destabilizing consequences and ultimately undercut our own national interests." He also voiced concerns about sending
anti-aircraft missiles to
Syrian rebels.
Caucus memberships • Founding Member and Dean of the
Congressional Black Caucus •
American Sikh Congressional Caucus •
Congressional Progressive Caucus •
United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus • Out of Afghanistan Caucus (Co-chair) • Congressional Full Employment Caucus •
Congressional Arts Caucus •
Afterschool Caucuses •
Congressional NextGen 9-1-1 Caucus == Detroit mayoral campaigns ==