By Jeffrey Page

Charles Rangel’s response to being censured by his colleagues in the House of Representatives contained the sounds of my childhood when a kid’s answer to a reprimand often was “But all the other kids do it and they didn’t get in trouble.”

It also reveals that this is a man who has basically told the House to go chase itself.

“ … we do know that we are a political body,” Rangel told the House in one-minute remarks after the censure vote. And then, without using the name, Rangel recalled the suffering of the man who preceded him in Congress. That would be Adam Clayton Powell. But Rangel, bemoaning the political nature of the House, didn’t tell the whole story.

Powell had his own ethics problems. It was in 1970, during Powell’s troubles, that Rangel declared his own candidacy – for Powell’s seat. Rangel won the primary and has been reelected every two years since, and Powell spent most of the next year and a half on Bimini in the Bahamas. He died at a hospital in Miami in 1972. Rangel omitted this coda to Powell’s career in his remarks about the politics of the House.

The House? A political body? Was there doubt? Ask any member who was around for the Powell episode or any member who’s around now. Politics? In Rangel’s case, it must be noted that while the current makeup of the House is 255 Democrats to 179 Republicans, the total vote on his censure was 333 to 79.

In the days after the House acted, Rangel tried to downplay his ethics breaches by cynically declaring that he was not guilty of some of the misdeeds that other members of the House have committed. “In all fairness,” he said over the weekend, “I was not found guilty of corruption. I did not go to bed with kids. I did not hurt the House speaker, I did not start a revolution against the United States of America. I did not steal any money. I did not take any bribes and that is abundantly clear.”

Well, as a matter of fact, nor did he murder anyone, commit arson, rape anyone, rob anything, lie under oath, or leave the scene of an accident. But that’s not the point. The point is that he violated the rules of the House. And a defense that leans on the notion that the other kids didn’t get punished is no defense at all.

The things he did do are the petty little breaches that serve to separate members of the House from the 300 million Americans who happen not to be in Congress. He failed to report income on a rental property he owns in the Dominican Republic. Not for one year but for several. He attributed this lapse to forgetfulness. Seriously, how do you forget income of almost $100,000?

Like all members of Congress, Rangel is allowed to send official mail without charge. But the House ethics committee found that he had used his postal privilege for other than official business, specifically to raise funds for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Policy at the City University of New York.

The list goes on. What are ordinary people supposed to make from Rangel’s failure to list $600,000 in assets on his Congressional financial disclosure form? He forgot? The dog ate his form?

In seemingly contradictory moods, Rangel said at one point he understands the House’s authority to police itself. And then, in one grand gesture of disdain, he told his colleagues:  “ … I know in my heart that I’m not going to be judged by this Congress but I’m going to be judged by my life, my activities, my contributions to society and I just apologize for the awkward position that some of you are in.”

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

Tags: Jeffrey Page

This entry was posted on Friday, December 3rd, 2010 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Jeffrey Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.