Rangel Gets Wrangled

Courtesy of the Associated Press

Playing With Fire

If you play with fire, eventually your going to get burned. Well, Charlie Rangel (D-NY) definitely got burned. The former Chairman of the House Ways and Means was charged with 13 ethic violations involving financial misconduct and harming the credibility of Congress. Now the embattled Congressman is facing a full trial-like hearing some time in the future to account for his actions which include: violating house gift rules, improperly using his office to raise money, and lying about his residence to evade taxes. Yet these serious charges have not seemed to discourage him; in fact, they seem to have done the opposite. Rangel has been notably open about his situation and has recently challenged the House ethics Committee to kick him out if it dares. Are his actions just a shrewd political front or really just deadly hubris?



Third Degree Burns

In early 2008 the United States House of Representative's Ethics Committee began to probe into the former Chairman's taxes as well as gifts he had recieved from corporations. On July 22, 2010 a four member investigative subcommittee found they had "substantial reasons to believe" that Charlie Rangel had committed serious ethics violations and that he will have to face a full ethics committee hearing at some time in the not to distant future. More recently, Representative Rangel apologized on the house floor but also told his peers to do what they must. He then challenged them to expedite the procedure and to kick him out. Still claiming his innocence however, Rep. Rangel ended his speech with "I am not going away. I am here."

Typically this type of grand standing would call condemnation down upon the individual however, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), seems unwilling to reprimand a member of her own party. A little less than a year after the Joe Wilson (R-SC) "You Lie!" incident when the Speaker issued a formal rebuke to Rep. Wilson,  Pelosi seems to be playing nice with a member of her own party spitting on the name of Congress. If this seems like a double standard, don't worry... because it is. This is nothing more than another example of Democrats protecting their own and turning an eye to corruption when it is a member of their inner circle. What is curious is the apparent lack of support for Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) who is also facing an ethics probe with a trial set for sometime this fall. Waters is under investigation for providing bailout money to a bank where her husband had been a director and where she had stock holdings. The difference here (I think) is that House Democrats felt that they would appear too partisan by protecting both Waters and Rangel, and decided to protect the more powerful and influential of the two.

Representative Charlie Rangel may get off with a clean record, or the judicial/ethical systems may do their jobs and remove him. Either way, I think this will spell the end of Congressman Rangel and that he will forever be known as the corrupt politician that he really is.