Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.)

In March 2010, Rangel finally buckled under pressure to resign his House Ways and Means Committee chairmanship after the House Standards of Official Conduct Committee admonished him for accepting 2007 and 2008 trips to the Caribbean sponsored by the Carib News Foundation, a charity that had major corporate underwriters. The committee found that although Rangel didn't personally know about the corporate sponsors, two of his staffers did and should have conveyed their information to the ethics committee.

"Rangel was responsible for the knowledge and actions of his staff in the performance of their official duties," the ethics statement reads.

In October 2009, the ethics committee had voted to widen its probe into more serious charges (ultimately resulting in the censure) over whether Rangel filed false financial disclosure forms with the House, among other things. In summer 2009, Rangel amended his House forms to report $500,000 in additional income.

But after negotiations failed, the ethics panel on July 29, 2010, opened the first phase of a trial into Rangel on 13 counts of alleged violations of House ethics rules.

As the trial formally opened, Rangel's defense team filed a 32-page rebuttal denying any wrongdoing.

The allegations were these: first, Rangel was discovered to be paying less than $4,000 a month for four rent-controlled apartments in a luxury Manhattan apartment building, despite his net worth of between $566,000 and $1.2 million. He was using one of them as a campaign office.

A few months later, it was reported that Rangel had been soliciting on congressional stationery private donations from business leaders and others for his new, eponymous center at a public university. The Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York was originally established when Rangel got a $1.9 million congressional earmark for it.

Then it became public that Rangel owed back taxes for failing to report $75,000 in rental income from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic, a situation the congressman blamed on a language barrier. Rangel said he believed that the controversies were due to a Republican-led "guerilla war" against him.

Health-Care Reform

In 2009, President Obama made reforming the nation's health-care system his top legislative priority, and Rangel joined Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) in unveiling the House Democrats' health-reform bill.

The three Democrats are the respective chairmen of the House committees with jurisdiction over health care: Miller of Education and Labor, Waxman of Energy and Commerce and Rangel of Ways and Means. Rather than producing three bills, the men pledged to write a "tri-committee" bill.

The bill, estimated to cost more than $1 billion, included progressive reforms such as a mandate that all Americans obtain health insurance with discounts for those who can't afford it, an expansion of the government-funded Medicaid program and a controversial new public health-insurance option. The bill required employers to provide health insurance to their employees or face a stiff fine equal to a percentage of payroll.

Rangel spearheaded an effort to pay for reforms by increasing income taxes on the rich on a sliding scale. Individuals earning more than $280,000 per year would face a one percent increase, and families earning more than $1 million annually would pay a 5.4 percent "surcharge."

The Congressional Budget Office's Doug Elmendorf estimated that the bill would extend coverage to 37 million Americans, leaving 17 million uninsured, half of whom would be illegal immigrants.

In November 2009, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) proposed a compromise bill that merged the three committee versions. In order to get conservative Democrats on board, Pelosi's plan included a publicly-funded health insurance option, but one that paid doctors and hospitals at higher rates than Medicare. Just before the bill went to a vote, Pelosi had to make significant concessions to Republicans by promising that the public plan would not fund abortions. In the end, the bill squeaked through the House by a vote of 220 to 215.

But after Democrat's lost their Senate super-majority in January 2010, health-care reform stalled. The House came to the rescue. Abandoning the public option, the House passed the Senate version of health-care reform in March 2010, clearing the way for the Senate to approve a package of amendments insisted on by the lower chamber with a simple majority (using a process known as reconciliation). After more than a year of legislative wrangling, President Obama signed a health-reform bill into law on March 23, 2010. That bill doesn't include the public option or the House's tax on wealthier Americans.

The $940 billion bill requires most Americans to carry health insurance and mandates that insurance companies cover them, regardless of preexisting conditions. It establishes a national insurance exchange allowing Americans to compare and purchase insurance plans. The bill will be paid for by increasing taxes on well-off Medicare recipients and by taxing premium insurance plans. By the end of the bill's 10-year roll-out, 32 million uninsured Americans will have health coverage and the deficit will be $138 billion lower, the Congressional Budget Office estimated.

The Economy

Rangel reluctantly voted in favor of what he called the "imperfect" $700 billion bailout bill in fall 2008. He said it was "an answer for all those whose ability to pay rent and to buy basic necessities was shrinking as each minute of inaction passed." Rangel was a co-sponsor of President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus plan approved in February 2009.

Rangel prides himself on sticking up for little guy. In the 90s, he wrote the $5 billion Federal Empowerment Zone demonstration project to revive urban neighborhoods; it brought $200 million to his Harlem district. He sponsored both the earned income tax credit and the work opportunity tax credit. The low income housing tax credit, which he authored, has provided financing for 90 percent of affordable housing built in the U.S. since the 1990s.

Most importantly to his constituents, Rangel has delivered money to his district, winning assistance for the upper Manhattan empowerment zone, the Apollo Theater, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Museum for African Art, the Abyssinian Baptist Church and funds to reconstruct Alexander Hamilton's former home in Harlem.

Rangel is seen as more open to trade agreements than many other Democrats, as evidenced by his support for an African free-trade agreement in 2000, which some other members of the Congressional Black Caucus opposed. When he took over the Ways and Means Committee, Rangel said he would like the entire panel, rather than the more protectionist Trade subcommittee, to consider trade agreements. He favors eliminating sanctions on trade with Cuba.

Taxes

Rangel opposed the 2001 and 2003 George W. Bush tax cuts ebecause he said they would disproportionately favor the rich. Although Republicans said the New York Democrat would immediately act to them back as Ways and Means chairman, that didn't happen.

Rangel, like Obama, said he would instead wait for (most) of them to expire on their own at . "I don't want to go retroactive in terms of any of the tax cuts. I think retroactive tax increases are bad tax policy," Rangel said right before the 2006 elections.

That didn't stop Rangel from getting into a testy exchange with former veep Dick Cheney over the issue, however.

"Charlie doesn't understand how the economy works," Vice President Dick Cheney after the 2006 elections elevated Rangel to tax-panel chair.

Rangel responded by calling the vice president a "S.O.B" and suggested Cheney may need to enter "rehab" to confront a personality disorder.

Rangel has also sought to find a permanent solution to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which was instituted in 1969 to ensure the very wealthy paid their fair share to Uncle Sam.

But the tax was never adjusted for inflation and hits an increasingly high number of middle-to-upper income taxpayers - many of them in Rangel's home state of New York. But a comprehensive roll-back failed in 2007 after more conservative House Democrats insisted that the $1 trillion cost of rolling back the tax be offset. Annual "patches" to protect additional taxpayers were instead enacted.

Rangel has also stood up for New Yorkers in the tax wars; he fought to preserve the state and local income tax deduction in the 1986 tax reform bill.

But Rangel obstructed President Obama's initial bid to eliminate tax deductions for the wealthy in the president's first budget announced in February 2009. The plan would have generated $318 billion in savings, but Rangel and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said it would curtail charitable giving.

Iraq and Foreign Affairs

Rangel was in the minority that voted against the 2002 resolution authoring President Bush to use force in Iraq. A year later, he was calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. On Dec. 31, 2002, Rangel issued a plea for the revival of the draft, saying, "For those who say the poor fight better, I say give the rich a chance." He reintroduced draft bills in both 2006 and 2007.

The New York Democrat has engaged in some sharp exchanges with the Bush administration over the reasons for going to war. Once, when Vice President Cheney basically called Rangel senile, Rangel responded with a sharp riposte, saying, "I was flattered that he knew I was this oldI knew all I had to do was challenge him to a psychiatric examination, to take a lie-detector test over the reasons we went to war. And I would have fun doing it. But then I realized that I could be showing disrespect for my country and the office."

Show less