There goes another one. Thank heaven.

There are some things in your life that are such constants, for good or ill, that when they finally fall away you simply must take note of the fact.

I’m from Detroit originally. In fact I lived in the Detroit area off and on until I was well into my forties. As a little boy I ran around in a segregated (and apparently very safe) lower class neighborhood, half a block away from a wildly and entertainingly integrated business street. I saw the smoke from the riots, and the wreckage of those businesses. I saw the rise of Coleman Young and watched Detroit become a different sort of segregated (and very unsafe) city. I watched a sibling abandon an unsellable house; just packed up his family and moved away. Didn’t bother locking the door behind them. I saw the ruin that house became. I saw the stripped shell of the house where I spent my first six years of life, on a block that looked like it was in postwar Berlin. Not with a lot of nostalgia, I remember Detroit.

And through much of it and for many years after, from the time I was about ten years old, I heard the name John Conyers.

This corrupt SOB survived one redistricting after another during Detroit’s long depopulating collapse. He’s been in congress for full fifty years, and he’s not leaving it voluntarily. His apparently final failure comes as a dying gasp of irony.

DETROIT (AP) — Longtime Congressman John Conyers of Michigan doesn’t have enough signatures to appear on the Aug. 5 primary ballot, an elections official announced Tuesday.

Conyers’ nominating petitions were insufficient, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett said in a statement.

It follows her report last week finding Conyers more than 400 signatures short of 1,000 needed. Garrett said Tuesday that he had 592 valid signatures after challenges.

The 84-year-old Detroit Democrat was at risk because officials believe several people who circulated his petitions do not appear to have been registered voters or had registered too late.

Well. I suppose now he’ll have more time to visit his wife in prison.