Rangel’s allies attempt final effort to lighten censure punishment

Senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and New York’s
House delegation plan to make a last-ditch effort to convince their
colleagues not to censure Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.).

Rangel’s allies will argue the 40-year House veteran and former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee should not be subjected to the humiliation of a formal censure.

{mosads}Under the punishment, Rangel would be forced to stand in the well of the House while the ethics charges and committee findings are read by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The list of possible speakers who will defend Rangel, according to Democratic sources, include New York Democratic Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Anthony Weiner.

New York Rep. Pete King, a senior GOP member of the delegation who has repeatedly bucked his party over efforts to condemn Rangel, could also voice his support on the

House floor and possibly even propose a resolution offering a lighter sanction, sources said. King’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Rangel has also written to his campaign supporters, asking them to call the Capitol switchboard and urge their representatives to support a lesser reprimand, according to The New York Post.

The CBC and New York delegation are hopeful they can convince enough colleagues to vote for the lesser penalty of reprimand even as Rangel’s Democratic critics confidently predict that the censure punishment will stick.

Those supporting Rangel say the allegations against him don’t compare to those of most — if not all — of the 22 other members who have received censure in the House’s history.

“It’s like getting a year in jail for a parking ticket,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), a prominent CBC member, on the eve of the vote.

“The word is proportionality,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), another member of the CBC.

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, said he “would be inclined to vote against the censure because I don’t think it’s justified. I don’t know that he’s committed any crime — that he’s broken the law.”

Other lawmakers said the decorated Korean War veteran has been punished enough in the last two years as he has endured embarrassing teary-eyed photos of himself in the media and a throng of reporters hounding him everywhere he goes in the Capitol — as well as his home in Harlem.

“It’s clear there will be a rebuke of some kind,” said outgoing Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.), another member of the Ways and Means panel who has worked alongside Rangel for years. “But he’s received enough humiliation already — the pictures of him defending himself [during his public trial] without a lawyer were just pitiful. A lot of us are heartsick that a Korean War hero would have this as part of his last years in the House.”

But the vote to censure Rangel is putting other members of the Ways and Means panel and Democratic leaders in an awkward position.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) would not say how he would vote, and others who said they were undecided as of Wednesday night included Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who serves as the assistant to the Speaker, and Ron Kind (D-Wis.), who has championed tougher ethics rules. Both serve on the Ways and Means panel.

The House ethics committee recommended the punishment after an adjudicatory panel found Rangel guilty of 11 counts of ethics violations, including improperly soliciting donations for an educational center bearing his name, failing to pay taxes on a Caribbean villa and filing financial disclosure forms riddled with mistakes.

Yet even Nadler said he did not know how he would vote when the House considers the matter Thursday because there were so many questions surrounding the procedure and whether Democrats would have a chance to offer a more lenient alternative.

In the past, the House has voted to downgrade the sanction the ethics panel recommended. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) received a reprimand in 1990 for improperly dismissing an assistant’s parking tickets and failing to prevent his house from being used for prostitutes by third parties. The ethics committee recommended a censure and the House voted to lessen the punishment to reprimand.

In the last 100 years, there have been just four censures. The last was in 1983, when then-Reps. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) and Daniel Crane (R-Ill.) were punished for having sexual relations with 17-year-old House pages. Before that, Rep. Charles Wilson (D-Calif.) was censured for accepting money from a person with direct interest in the legislation and appropriating campaign funds for personal use, and Rep. Charles Diggs Jr. (D-Mich.) was convicted of 11 counts of mail fraud and 18 counts of false statements.

Rep. Artur Davis (Ala.), who lost his primary bid for governor and will be leaving Congress at the end of the year, was the only Democratic member  contacted by The Hill to provide a forceful argument for censuring Rangel. Davis, a former assistant U.S. attorney who is known for objecting to the party line, predicted Rangel would be censured.

Davis said it makes no sense for the House to lessen Rangel’s penalty to reprimand after he refused to settle with the ethics committee for that very same penalty in July.

Doing so would encourage more lawmakers to fight the charges and opt for messy public trials.

“You send the wrong signal that way,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any real question that there isn’t the sentiment outside the CBC and the New York delegation to lessen the sentence.”

Russell Berman and Lauren Victoria Burke contributed to this story.