Happiness Quote by John Conyers

Conyers is doing two things at once: sounding an alarm and assigning blame. The first sentence is deliberately blunt, almost bureaucratic in its cadence, because the subject resists ornament. “On the rise” frames attacks on judges as a trend, not an isolated outrage, which is politically useful: trends demand policy, budgets, hearings, and public attention. “No laughing matter” reads like a rebuke to a culture that treats civic norms as content, where threats can be brushed off as trolling, “just jokes,” or heat-of-the-moment rhetoric.

The second sentence sharpens into an indictment of elite behavior. Conyers doesn’t accuse “people” in general; he targets “leaders,” the class with microphones and plausible deniability. “Attempt to rationalize” is carefully chosen. It’s not merely that leaders inflame passions; it’s that they launder aggression into reasoned grievance, giving followers a moral permission slip. The subtext is about institutional legitimacy: courts can withstand unpopular rulings, but they cannot function if judges are treated as fair game and the public is taught to see intimidation as politics by other means.

Coming from Conyers, a longtime House figure steeped in civil rights-era battles over the rule of law, the warning carries an insider’s understanding of how fragile democratic guardrails are. He’s defending judicial independence without romanticizing judges; the point isn’t that courts are saints, but that once violence becomes a sanctioned language of dissent, every decision starts to look like a target. The real fear is contagion: rationalization doesn’t just excuse violence after the fact; it recruits it.