Conyers Suddenly Backpeddling on Impeachment

Dem Rep. John Conyers has been one of President Bush's most vocal critics, including holding mock impeachment hearings and all kinds of other nutty press events. Suddenly Conyers has come out with an op-ed in the Washington Post trying to backpeddle away from the impeachment threats:

It was House Republicans who took power in 1995 with immediate plans to undermine President Bill Clinton by any means necessary, and they did so in the most autocratic, partisan and destructive ways imaginable. If there is any lesson from those "revolutionaries," it is that partisan vendettas ultimately provoke a public backlash and are never viewed as legitimate.

So, rather than seeking impeachment, I have chosen to propose comprehensive oversight of these alleged abuses. The oversight I have suggested would be performed by a select committee made up equally of Democrats and Republicans and chosen by the House speaker and the minority leader.

The committee's job would be to obtain answers -- finally. At the end of the process, if -- and only if -- the select committee, acting on a bipartisan basis, finds evidence of potentially impeachable offenses, it would forward that information to the Judiciary Committee. This threshold of bipartisanship is appropriate, I believe, when dealing with an issue of this magnitude.

One-party rule has dug our nation into a deep hole over the past six years. The Judiciary Committee needs to fully implement the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, strengthen laws against wartime fraud, ban trade with state sponsors of terrorism, increase funding for community policing and protect government whistle-blowers. Most important, before we have another presidential election, I believe we need to pass laws protecting the integrity of our electoral system -- the very foundation of our democracy.

Conyers basically admits in the first paragraph of this excerpt that his faux impeachment antics have been an effort to avenge the treatment of Bill Clinton by the Republicans. So why the sudden change of heart?

Number one, he's probably gotten an earful from San Fran Nan Pelosi to cool his jets lest he fire up the GOP base in advance of the November mid-terms and ruin the Dems plans for a House takeover. Secondly, he's probably worried that the Dems may be a little overconfident, and that the actual electoral numbers do not point to a change in leadership. He doesn't want to be blamed for the failure of the Dems to take the House.

Not that any of that matters, of course. Does anyone seriously doubt that the number one goal of House Dems would be impeachment should they take control again? Even if the Senate stayed in GOP hands and there was no possibility of a conviction and ouster of the President, the House Dems would surely launch hearings and bring charges at the first opportunity.

Today's op-ed from Conyers certainly isn't going to dispel any doubts about his sincerity.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg adds:

When I hear someone like Conyers say there's no rush , I translate that as "we're going to take our own sweet time and enjoy every minute of it."