Friday, February 26, 2010

So what about Charlie Rangel?

Is Grandma speaker going to have to boot the chair of the House Ways and Means committee? She did promise the most ethical Congress but then, she also swore to uphold the Constitution.

The House ethics committee's decision to admonish New York Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel over improper corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean leaves Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the ethics committee itself facing difficult questions.

When then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) was admonished by the ethics committee in October 2004, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders went on the offensive against him.

“Mr. DeLay has proven himself to be ethically unfit to lead the party,” Pelosi said at a news conference the following day. “The burden falls upon his fellow House Republicans. Republicans must answer: Do they want an ethically unfit person to be their majority leader or do they want to remove the ethical cloud that hangs over the Capitol?”

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) — now the House majority leader — said DeLay "certainly ought to step aside as leader at this point in time because I think his credibility has been undermined by these findings."

Six years later, the shoe is on the other foot: Republicans have previously called for Rangel to lose his chairmanship over his ethical troubles, and some of them — including Indiana Rep. Mike Pence — renewed that call Thursday night.

How will Pelosi and Hoyer respond?

Neither had anything to say about Rangel's future Thursday night, but the issue is certain to be a central topic for Democratic leadership in the days ahead.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33564.html#ixzz0gexZ4qb8

BUT this goes even further than Rangeling another pass for the Congressman...

The ethics committee, meanwhile, appears to have issues of its own.

In a statement Thursday night, committee leaders Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Jo Bonner (R-Ala.), took Rangel and his staff to task — but also admonished the committee's own former counsel.

"The evidence shows that Rep. Rangel’s staff knew that corporations had contributed funds to Carib News specifically for the 2007 and 2007 [trips],” Lofgren and Bonner said. “This information was not provided to the Standards Committee when [Rangel] sought and received approval to accept these trips."

Lofgren and Bonner said the ethics committee “did not find actual evidence, nor does it believe that it would discover additional evidence” to show that Rangel personally knew about the corporate funding, but they added that Rangel “was responsible for the knowledge and actions of his staff in the performance of their official duties.”

The committee faulted its former counsel, Dawn Kelly Mobley, for giving confidential information to Carib News officials about the probe.

And the ethics committee made a criminal recommendation to the Justice Department against three Carib News employees — Karl Rodney, Faye Rodney and Patricia Louis — for having “submitted false or misleading information” to the ethics committee before it approved the trips.

For those who don't know, Representative Rangel (now there's some irony in that phrase) is also being investigated for not paying taxes on property rentals over several years (and I wonder how he came to have some of these expensive properties).

Labels: Criminals in Power