John Conyers

Apparently John Conyers’ behavior had been an open secret for years; as Cokie Roberts said on This Week a few weeks ago, “every female in the press corps knew, don’t get in elevator with him.” We’re left wondering how this could be such an open secret, and why Conyers’ creepy, predatory behavior was never reflected in the coverage of him. THE MORNING JOLT BY JIM GERAGHTY Let’s Hear It for the U.S. Border Patrol! SHARE ARTICLE ON FACEBOOKSHARE TWEET ARTICLETWEET PLUS ONE ARTICLE ON GOOGLE PLUS+1 PRINT ARTICLE ADJUST FONT SIZEAA by JIM GERAGHTY December 5, 2017 9:59 AM @JIMGERAGHTY Some good news from down on America’s southern border and throughout the country: The federal government, in the most complete statistical snapshot of immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump, says Border Patrol arrests plunged to a 45-year low while arrests by deportation officers soared. The Border Patrol made 310,531 arrests during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, a decline of 25 percent from 415,816 a year earlier and the lowest level since 1971. Despite the significant decline, arrests increased every month since May — largely families and unaccompanied children. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose officers pick up people for deportation away from the border, made 143,470 arrests, an increase of 25 percent from 114,434 a year earlier. After Trump took office, ICE arrests surged 40 percent from the same period a year earlier. . .  ICE said “interior removals” — people deported after being arrested away from the border — jumped 25 percent to 81,603 from 65,332 the previous year. They rose 37 percent since Trump’s inauguration compared to the same period a year earlier. Count the number of times you see the phrase “deporting immigrants” or “rounding up immigrants” from critics of this administration. They really love to drop that key “illegal” label, and speak as if the Scoops from Soylent Green were riding up at the conclusion of citizenship ceremonies and shoveling up everyone and taking them off to some dire fate. Whether these people are willing to admit it or not, their “deportation is wrong” perspective means they do not believe that there is any needed path to citizenship; they believe that citizenship is a matter of location. In their mentality, once you get across a U.S. border, you’re in. UP NEXT UP NEXT John Conyers Steps Aside Amid Misconduct Allegations 00:30 01:01 Powered by That’s not the law. John Conyers, Al Franken, Roy Moore, and the Psychological ‘Permission Slip’ The Republican National Committee, like President Trump, is formally supporting Roy Moore again. Are Democratic congressmen John Conyers and Senator Al Franken giving Alabama Republican voters psychological “permission” to vote for Roy Moore? Is there a similar effect for other Republican party leaders? The allegations against Roy Moore are as serious as they can get. There’s a decent amount of circumstantial evidence, and Moore’s initial denials were contradictory and unpersuasive. His current insistence that he never knew or met any of these women, and that anything he signed for them is a forgery, is similarly unconvincing. But there’s that nagging sense that his defeat would mean voters would be signing off on a new standard, that accusations of impropriety are sufficient to end a person’s career. Maybe Moore’s guilty as sin, but what about the next guy? If mere accusation becomes the new, universal standard for removal or disqualification, voters will keep some bad men out of office, but they say see some good men’s reputations and career’s destroyed by false accusations. And if we argue that Moore’s alleged behavior is worse than Conyers’ . . . well, Conyers is still pretty darn bad:   Another former staff employee of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, came forward late Monday to publicly accuse the congressman of sexual harassment, saying he once slid his hand up her skirt in church. Attorney Lisa Bloom, who is representing Marion Brown, the former staffer who first accused Conyers, 88, of sexual harassment, on Monday night made public on Twitter an affidavit from Elisa Grubbs making many of the same accusations. She said in the affidavit she saw Conyers groping and stroking Brown’s legs and the legs of other women in the office and that she saw Brown shortly after an alleged event in Chicago in 2005 where Brown said Conyers’ propositioned her in a hotel room. In the affidavit, Grubbs said Brown told her, “That SOB just wanted me to have sex with him.” She also said she was sitting next to him at church on another occasion when he ran his hand under her skirt and said other people saw him do it. Conyers’ attorney, Arnold Reed of Southfield, dismissed the new claims, noting that Grubbs is a relative of Brown’s and calling them “another instance of tomfoolery from the mouth of Harvey Weinstein’s attorney.” Bloom previously represented Weinstein, a movie mogul accused of sexual harassment by several women, before resigning in recent months. Reed added that Grubb’s claims were “unworthy of any further response.” Conyers has already been accused by at least six women of sexual harassment or other improper behavior, including showing up in his underwear for meetings. In her statement, Grubbs said she was at his home on one occasion when he came out of the bathroom naked. The allegation is that he groped her in church. This morning, Conyers is scheduled to hold a press conference discussing his future. Apparently he will refuse to resign: Mr. Conyers, 88, who last week stepped aside as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, planned to announce on Tuesday that he would not seek re-election, according to a family member who wants to run for the congressman’s seat. “He is not resigning,” Ian Conyers, a Michigan state senator, said of his great-uncle. “He is going to retire.” Apparently John Conyers’ behavior had been an open secret for years; as Cokie Roberts said on This Week a few weeks ago, “every female in the press corps knew, don’t get in elevator with him.” We’re left wondering how this could be such an open secret, and why Conyers’ creepy, predatory behavior was never reflected in the coverage of him. (Conyers was the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee back during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and pulled out all the stops to insist that Clinton’s actions were a private mistake and that Republicans were the true villains in the story. Before the committee vote on impeachment, he declared, “if the American people ever wanted strong evidence that the extremists are still in control of this process, then that is it. It is time to give the American people a holiday gift, to end this sordid tale.” Nobody thought it was relevant that he was harassing his own staff and reporters all along? Of course Conyers wouldn’t give Clinton any grief for seeing his own workforce as a personal harem, he was doing the same thing! And once Bill Clinton escaped any serious consequence . . . what lessons do you think Conyers took from the whole experience?) --Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt

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