A House full of Rangels

Charlie Rangel stood, stony-faced, in the well of the House. His feet planted wide, his hands crossed over his fly, the 80-year-old lawmaker awaited the rebuke of his peers.

On Thursday evening, for the first time in 27 years, the speaker read aloud the resolution of reproach. "By its adoption of House Resolution 1737, the House is resolved that representative Charles Rangel of New York be censured," Nancy Pelosi read, calling on the fallen chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to pay the taxes he owes. Rangel, staring back at the speaker, swallowed hard.

After the ritual of public humiliation, the Harlem Democrat's friends came with outstretched arms to console him, but Rangel brushed them off, instead requesting permission to address the House.

The disgraced lawmaker, defiant even in his moment of shame, scolded his accusers for treating him worse than "those that in the past have done far more harm to the reputation of this body than I." Several dozen lawmakers actually applauded him.

Rangel then went downstairs to offer more defiance at a news conference. "I leave here knowing that everyone knows I'm an honest guy," he proclaimed, accusing his colleagues of a "very, very, very political vote." The freshly censured legislator even offered a suggestion for newspaper headlines: "Rangel found not guilty of corruption and self-dealing."

Sorry, Charlie: That's not going to happen. But if it's any consolation, Rangel should know that however harmed he was by the censure, the entity that was really disgraced was Congress itself. This is because Rangel's two-year battle with the House ethics committee exposed the woeful state of lawmakers' ability to police their own.

The rules governing members' behavior were proven so lax as to be irrelevant. The vast majority of transgressors are never punished - Rangel was penalized only because he himself asked the ethics committee to investigate some of the allegations against him.

To be sure, Rangel deserved punishment for his wrongdoing, which included failing to pay taxes on his beach house in the Dominican Republic and improperly using his office for charitable fundraising. But in the 30 minutes allotted to him for his defense on the House floor Thursday evening, Rangel and his friends made a compelling case that he was being punished for doing things that lawmakers do routinely.

"The only examples of anybody sanctioned for tax matters in this House in the history of the United States have been those who didn't pay taxes on bribes they received," Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) argued in Rangel's defense. Several members had a chuckle over their laxity.

"Far more serious ethical lapses than Mr. Rangel's have not met with censure," seconded Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.).

And Rep. Peter King (N.Y.), one of the few Republicans to oppose censure for Rangel, implored his colleagues to "step back" and reconsider. "Let us apply the same standard of justice to Charlie Rangel that has been applied to everyone else, and that all of us would want applied to ourselves."

Which is to say: a very lenient standard.

According to a Congressional Research Service report (furnished to reporters by Rangel's staffers at a post-censure news conference), there had been only 22 censures in the history of the House - and only five in the past 120 years. In the entire history of the House, only five members have been expelled (and three of those were in 1861).

Rarely has the ethics process looked worse. The committee recently postponed a trial of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), while on the same day suspending two committee lawyers working on her case. This year, the ethics committee declined to take action against several lawmakers, even though an independent body had determined that defense contractors believed they were making campaign contributions to the members in exchange for federal grants.

Rangel did his part to reduce the committee's credibility. First, he begged for a speedy trial. Then, when his trial came, he pleaded for a postponement before walking out of the proceedings. Finally, on Thursday, he dismissed the censure as pure politics ("members voted their districts with all of the political implications") and brushed off reporters' questions with put-downs ("I'll come back to you when you can think of a good question").

Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Tex.), a member of the ethics committee, said he hoped that Rangel's censure could bring "a new era of ethics to restore the credibility and integrity of this House."

Nice idea. But that era won't come unless the other 434 members are held to the same standard Rangel was.