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Charles Rangel, Charged With Ethics Breaches, Not the Man I Knew

By Paul Shepard on Jul 23rd 2010 11:58AM
Filed under: News, Profiles, Politics, Race and Civil Rights

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Charles Rangel Charged with Ethics Breaches

Rep. Charles Rangel of New York is bellowing the standard defense that he is looking forward to fighting the serious ethics charges filed against him on Thursday by the House Ethics Committee.

But make no mistake that the political career of the 80-year-old lawmaker is in its final chapter.

Between the multiple charges that he used his office for personal gain and the upcoming primary fight against Adam Clayton Powell, Rangel is political toast.

This is a sad and bewildering chapter in black politics.

Sad because Rangel, one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rose through the ranks to become the first black head of the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.

Sad because when I covered Congress for the Associated Press in the 1990s, I could always count on an engaging chat with Rangel and his equally gravely voiced chief aide Emile Milne at his office.

Conversations could flow from the latest news on the Hill to foreign affairs, and I always left the room better informed than when I entered it.

I can't say the talks made us friends -- I'm not sure if we ever worked through the natural skepticism that exists between a news-making politician and a news-seeking journalist -- but I did think that our breezy, informal (and occasionally salty) off-the-record chats gave me a glimpse into his character over time.

Call me naive. But I never saw Rangel as the type of politician who would flout the rules of Congress so openly. Could he have been cutting corners for a while? There were rumors of that sort floating for years, but I wasn't close enough to tell.
And the truth is few politicians I've ever met would pass that smell test. But Rangel certainly appeared to be too smart to go down this way and with so many different allegations against him.

And that's why I'm bewildered.

Could it be that Rangel simply forgot the rules? Did it slip his mind that he wasn't supposed to use his letterhead to get corporate donations for a building named after him, as charged? Did he forget that it's a no-no to give tax benefits to a company that donated to him? Or that he was supposed to pay taxes on his vacation home in the Dominican Republic?

That's not the Charlie Rangel I knew, but that Rangel will surely be exposed when his trial starts.

For his long years of service, Rangel should be leaving office under a mark of distinction. Instead, unless prosecutors are way, way wrong, Rangel will be leaving under a stain.



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