Censure for Rangel?

The Ethics Committee just voted 9-1 that Congressman Charles Rangel be Censured this is via NPR.

A censure is the strongest penalty that could have been issued short of expulsion.  Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat, was expelled by the House for bribery and other crimes in 2002.

The last members of the House to be censured were Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) and Dan Crane (R-Ill.), who were punished in 1983 for sexual misconduct with underage congressional pages.  Crane was defeated for re-election in 1984; Studds continued to win until he retired in 1996.

Rangel was easily elected to his 21st term earlier this month with about 80 percent of the vote

Today’s  Christian Science Monitor has an interesting story of Rangel’s problems.  Staff Writer Peter Grier reviews how Rangel has defended himself by pleading ignorance rather than corruption.  This evidently did not fly with the panel of Rangel’s Congressional peers.

That is why at his punishment hearing on Tuesday Rangel admitted that he had done wrong in such matters as failing to pay taxes on rental income earned from his Dominican Republic beach villa, and soliciting donations for the Charles Rangel Center for Public Service – but that his actions had been inadvertent.

“I had no intent to evade or avoid the law,” Rangel told a hearing of the full House Ethics Committee.

He hadn’t known the details of his own tax returns, he said. Officials from the City College of New York, site of the Rangel Center, had come to him and suggested that he would be the best person to raise needed cash for the institution, according to Rangel.

In brief remarks to the committee he reminded them that the panel’s own chief counsel, Blake Chisam, under questioning early in the week, had said he saw no evidence of corruption per se in Rangel’s actions.

The more questionable charges concerned Rangel’s handling of donations for the Rangel Center although many believed that in his position on the Ways and Means Committee that it was unlikely he wasn’t aware that the income from his condominium in the Dominican Republic was taxable.

And some panel members questioned Rangel’s assertion that he is not corrupt. They noted that he had failed to pay taxes on his beach villa for 17 years, and that he indeed reaped personal gain from that, in the form of a lower tax bill.

After all, Rep. James Traficant, the Ohio Democrat expelled from the House in 2002 after felony convictions on bribery and other charges, only failed to pay taxes for two years.

“Failure to pay taxes for 17 years. What is that?” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R) of Texas.

Rangel targeted donors for the Rangel Center who had legislative business before the House Ways and Means Committee, which he chaired at the time, according to Mr. McCaul.

“Is that not corruption?” said McCaul. “I guess it is how you define corruption here. I think reasonable people may disagree on that interpretation.”

This is a study in how one powerful and popular congressman has fallen from grace if there ever was one.