John Conyers: “to my Republican friends, sincerely, Gerald Ford has said that we must take the path back to dignity. I want that to…”

“to my Republican friends, sincerely, Gerald Ford has said that we must take the path back to dignity. I want that to weigh on the Members' hearts for this next hour, because more is at stake than the President's fate. ``Moving with dispatch,'' Gerald Ford said, ``the House Judiciary Committee should be able to conclude a preliminary inquiry into possible grounds for impeachment before the end of the year.'' I think that we can do it. Our resolution calls for it. I have talked incessantly in private meetings with the gentleman from Illinois (Chairman Hyde) toward this end, and I hope that all of us will commit ourselves to that goal. Mr. Speaker, I just want Members to know that in my view, the American people have a deep sense of right and wrong, of fairness and privacy. I believe that the Kenneth W. Starr investigation may have offended those sensibilities. Who are we in the Congress? What is it that we stand for? Do we want to have prosecutors with unlimited powers, accountable to no one, who will spend a million dollars investigating a person's sex life, is that the precedent we are setting, who then haul them before grand juries, every person that they have known of the opposite sex, every person that they had contact with, and then record and release videos to the public of the grand jury questioning the most private aspects of one's personal life? Please, I beg the Members not to denigrate this very important process in Article II, Section 4.”