It's Time for Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and Other `Progressives' in Congress to Take a Stand
David Lindorff
What's missing in Congress these days is real progressive leadership and real political courage.
Over the past several decades, the Democratic Party has been entirely taken over by corporate shills and money-grubbing sleazes while those who might still have some vestigial remnant of a conscience or genuine concern for the plight of the common person have been co-opted or intimidated into silence or powerlessness.
Look at Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). He says all the right things. He's fought all the good fights. And yet after 15 years in Congress, he is chair of what? The House subcommittee on domestic policy of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Heck, his post doesn't even merit capitalization in the AP Stylebook! And when he submits an important bill, like his articles of impeachment of both former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, he can't even get a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.
Which, of course, is chaired by another long-standing allegedly progressive House member, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Conyers, despite being chair of the House Progressive Caucus (the largest, and least powerful Democratic Party caucus in the Congress) and despite his having served 22 terms in the House, couldn't even manage to get "permission" from the Speaker (Rep. Nancy Pelosi--once a member of the Progressive Caucus!) to hold a hearing on impeachment during the Bush/Cheney years in the Judiciary Committee that he chairs. And more recently, he was even barred from having his own health reform proposal--an expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans--get a lousy hearing in the House. Progressives in the Democratic Party are both joke and oxymoron 1.