John Conyers

John Conyers

John Conyers Jr. ( May 16, 1929 in Detroit , Michigan , † October 27, 2019 ) was an American politician of the Democratic Party . He was a member of the US House of Representatives from 1965 to 2017 and has since represented the respective congressional electoral district of the state of Michigan, which covers the northwest of Detroit, Highland Park , Hamtramck and Dearborn .

Life

John Conyers was born in Detroit in 1929 and attended public schools in the city. He served in the Michigan National Guard from 1948 to 1950 and in the US Army from 1950 to 1954 . As a member of the Army Corps of Engineers , he was deployed in the Korean War , among other things . After returning to Michigan, he attended Wayne State University , where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1957 and a Juris Doctor in 1958 .

Conyers was married and had two sons.

Political career

Conyers joined the Democratic Party and worked for some time on the staff of Congressman John Dingell Jr. As an opponent of President Richard Nixon , he made it to number 13 on the so-called "enemy list" of the US President in 1971 , on which he was the "authoritative ( r) black (r) anti-Nixon spokesman ”and was said to have a“ weakness for white women ”.

In the 1964 congressional elections , Conyers was first elected to the House of Representatives. He took up his mandate on January 3, 1965. Since he was re-elected in all subsequent elections, including the one in 2016, he can continue to exercise his mandate today. His latest legislative term runs until January 3, 2019. This makes him the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives. That makes him the current Dean of the United States House of Representatives . He is currently ranked fourth in the history of the longest-serving congressman. If you include the US Senate on that list, it's still the seventh longest-serving member of Congress. As a member of parliament, he has seen ten incumbent US presidents so far. His time in Congress included the Vietnam War , the civil rights movement , the Watergate affair , the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks , the Iraq war and the military operation in Afghanistan . Conyers was a leading figure in the Democratic Party and intermittently chaired the Justice Committee of the House of Representatives. He was a member of this committee until he left in 2017. During his long tenure as a congressman, his congressional district numbering changed several times. Until 1993 he represented the 1st and then until 2013 the 14th constituency of his state in the House of Representatives. Since January 3, 2013 he was the representative of the 13th electoral district.

Conyers appears in Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 in the discussion of the Patriot Act . Its striking quote "We do not read most of the bills" ( "We read most bills do not" ) from the documentation falls on demand Michael Moore's why the Patriot Act was approved quickly and without content knowledge of the deputies.

In 2007 Conyers was awarded the Spingarn Medal .

Conyers advocated a ban on US military support for the Ukrainian neo-Nazi battalion " Azov ".

On November 26, 2017, he announced that he would give up his seat on the Legal Affairs Committee and seek his rehabilitation before the House of Representatives Ethics Committee. Previously, allegations had been raised that Conyers had sexually molested female employees for years and used public funds "for unauthorized personal purposes".

On December 5, 2017, Conyers resigned from the US House of Representatives. The Republican Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder , decided that a by-election would not take place until the regular election in November 2018 , so the seat would remain vacant for almost a year.

Web links

Commons : John Conyers  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• official website
• John Conyers in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

Footnotes

1. ^ Adam Clymer: John Conyers Jr., Longest-Serving African-American in Congressional History, Dies at 90. In: The New York Times , October 27, 2019 (English). Retrieved October 28, 2019.
2. ↑ house.gov: Biography , accessed on 10 February 2010
3. ↑ Re-election 2016 to Ballotpedia
4. ↑ congress.gov: Azov Amendment Act , accessed June 15, 2015
5. ↑ congress.gov June 10, 2015: Declaration of the Azov Amending Law
6. ↑ FAZ.net
7. ↑ washingtonpost.com
8. ^ John Conyers Will Leave Congress Amid Harassment Claims. In: The New York Times, December 5, 2017.
9. ↑ David Weigel: Special election to replace Rep. John Conyers in Michigan set for November 2018. In: The Chicago Tribune , December 8, 2017 (English).