Justice & Law Quote by John Conyers

Conyers is doing two things at once: staking a claim to constitutional seriousness while baiting his opponents into revealing their own selective memory. The Magna Carta reference is a shibboleth in American civic religion, a shorthand for the idea that power must answer to law. By invoking it, Conyers wraps himself in a lineage that even the most hard-nosed originalist is supposed to revere. Then he twists the knife: “I can only imagine” is feigned modesty, the rhetorical equivalent of raising an eyebrow. He’s not guessing; he’s accusing.

The phrase “our friends on the right” is the real tell. It’s faux-courteous, a Washington polite fiction deployed as a weapon. The subtext: conservatives celebrate tradition until tradition threatens their preferred outcomes. Conyers is implying that the right’s legal project is less about fidelity to history than about controlling which history counts. Magna Carta is safe when it functions as patriotic wallpaper; it becomes “forbidden” when it supports expansive readings of rights, limits on executive power, or robust judicial attention to due process.

Context matters here: Conyers spent decades in fights over civil rights, executive overreach, and the courts. He’s speaking from a long Democratic critique that conservative jurisprudence cherry-picks “founding” authorities to narrow modern protections while rejecting broader, older constraints on arbitrary power. The line works because it collapses a sprawling argument about legal hypocrisy into a single, tart insinuation: if even Magna Carta is too inconvenient, what exactly is this movement conserving?