It is time for Democrats in Congress — who once justifiably complained about the corruption of the Republican majority — to demonstrate to Americans that someone in that august body has ethical standards.
Instead, House Democrats have again shielded Representative Charles Rangel from his serial ethical messes and ducked their responsibility to force him from the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, maintaining her tunnel vision on behalf of a powerful colleague, led the majority to defeat the Republicans’ latest call to depose the New York lawmaker. She does the nation no favor.
Two of her Democrats broke ranks and voted against Mr. Rangel, but far more need to face up to the obvious: the chairman’s gavel weighs increasingly like a millstone as new disclosures surface about Mr. Rangel’s ethical gaffes and official misdeeds.
The most recent was the congressman’s postscripting more than $500,000 to his assets disclosure last summer, essentially doubling his net worth to somewhere between $1 million and $2.4 million. This joined a lengthy docket of bizarre-to-outrageous behavior that was supposed to have been fully investigated by the House by last January, according to Ms. Pelosi’s initial estimate.
Mr. Rangel’s accumulating missteps and Ms. Pelosi’s refusal to force him to step aside only compound the spectacle. Here is the nation’s chief of tax-writing legislation clinging to power even as his flaws as taxpayer and lawmaker grind slowly and mysteriously through the House ethics committee.
The congressman clearly violated House standards in using his official letterhead to solicit donations from scores of business and foundation leaders for a City College of New York center named for him to house “the inspirational aspects of my legacy.” one oil executive pledged $1 million to Mr. Rangel, who insists there was no quid pro quo in his defending an off-shore tax loophole worth tens of millions to the donor.
Mr. Rangel admitted an “irresponsible” slip-up in his failure to pay taxes and disclose $75,000 in income from a Dominican villa on which he enjoyed an interest-free mortgage. Closer to home, the congressman was allotted four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem by a politically savvy landlord — a boon worth an estimated $30,000 a year. The ethics panel is supposed to be studying whether that violates House gift rules.
The Republicans, of course, were chortling at the electioneering value of their resolution that Mr. Rangel’s problems have “held the House up to public ridicule.” It’s hard to blame them. But they better beware — public ridicule is as easily applicable across the aisle and across the Capitol, where Senator John Ensign’s troubles in job hunting for his cuckolded former aide may eventually merit an ethics investigation.
Speaker Pelosi won her gavel with a promise to “drain the swamp” of the corruption afflicting the previous Republican majority. She has delivered on some of that promise, creating a new ethics oversight office. But protecting Mr. Rangel as chairman is a grave misstep that can only hand the ethics issue back to her opponents.