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Ways & Means
"One of my biggest jobs is to convince Democrats that it's not in our best interests to get even if we want to get something done," says the congressman.
(Kevin Clark - The Washington Post)
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He's talking about Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), the outgoing chair of Ways and Means. "The whole idea of legislating, of having the right to fight, was taken away," he says. "Tom DeLay and Bill Thomas were completely excluding Democrats from legislating. I'd have these photo ops -- which was the only time I'd get invited over to hear Thomas."
He can't quite stop himself now. His Harlem is up.
"They sent messages to their own senior members that they would not become chairman unless they were in lock step with their right-wing agenda. Many of my GOP friends didn't receive chairmanships because they were not in lock step with the right wing. Even tax bills that we Democrats supported, the GOP would put a poison pill in there and say, 'Go out and say the Democrats voted no.' "
He's hunched over his desk.
The power of a baron -- and yet, with a Republican in the White House, he's got to wield it like a ballet dancer.
"Fortunately, my age and seniority wouldn't allow me to wait till 2008 before I can become a real legislator. Everything we do, people are watching and looking toward 2008. That's why I hope we can be productive. That's the carrot I've been giving the administration."
He goes on: "Before the vice president took me on, most people didn't know who the hell Charlie Rangel was."
Which is not quite accurate.
Man of the House
Harlem, that historic neighborhood on Manhattan island, has given the world so many figures who became symbols: Father Divine and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., James Baldwin and James Weldon Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Countee Cullen.
It's both a community and a state of mind. But just as Los Angeles is no longer the city of "Chinatown," Harlem isn't the Harlem of the Cotton Club. Huge swaths have been gentrified and there are occasional protests by the poor about being moved aside. The Liberation Bookstore, where activists and African exiles used to hang out, is gone. But the famed Apollo Theater is still there. Sylvia's soul food restaurant hangs on. Scholars still troop to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Charlie Rangel first received national attention when he took on the legendary Powell in 1970 and defeated him in the Democratic primary. Rangel had been appointed an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1961. Later he was elected to the New York State Assembly. Powell was a bulwark on behalf of President Johnson's War on Poverty legislation in the 1960s but had been expelled from Congress in 1967 for ethics violations, a cataclysmic downfall for the political lion. (The Supreme Court overturned the House action.)
In 35 years in the House, Rangel has become a Harlem institution himself. He helped change the tax laws to punish U.S. companies that continued to do business with the South African apartheid regime. "Africans have a tremendous respect for him as a person," says Julius Coles, president of Africare, an aid organization. "The man has been in the forefront of the battle for African rights."
