Byron York has a fascinating article in NRO on the impeachment of Alcee Hastings, the Florida Democratic congressman and impeached federal judge who is said to be Nancy Pelosi’s choice for chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
York points out that John Conyers, who will be new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, “served as the chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee that investigated Hastings and unanimously recommended his impeachment.” The facts of the case, as recounted by York, are quite dramatic, but here I want to call attention only to a noteworthy speech Conyers made at the time:
In the summer of 1988, after he had played a key role in drawing up the articles of impeachment, Conyers made a speech before the House in which suggested that some of the allegations against Hastings, the first black to serve on the federal bench in Florida, might have been racially motivated. But as troubling as he found that possibility, Conyers said those concerns did not change the facts of the case. And the facts pointed to Hastings’s guilt.
In the speech, Conyers looked back to civil-rights days, when corrupt judges sometimes twisted and ignored the law. “We did not wage that civil rights struggle merely to replace one form of judicial corruption for another,” Conyers said. “The principle of equality requires that a black public official be held to the same standard that other public officials are held to.…Just as race should never disqualify a person from office, race should never insulate a person from the consequences of wrongful conduct.”
Someone should ask Conyers why, if “[t]he principle of equality requires that a black public official be held to the same standard that other public officials are held to,” that same principle does not require that minority applicants to college “be held to the same standard that other [applicants] are held to.”
