After electoral drubbing, Democrats must now deal with ethics trials

Fresh from a stinging midterm election defeat, House Democrats must quickly face another embarrassing spectacle: public trials for two of their most prominent members.

Reps. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), two senior
House veterans, have opted to fight the separate ethics charges in public ethics trials set to take place later this month and extend into the first week of December.

Drawing criticism from Republicans, House ethics chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) last month announced the trials would occur after the elections. Rangel’s will commence Nov. 15 and the Waters trial will start Nov. 29.

To make matters worse for a party still reeling from their losses,
Rangel, who is known for his colorful and rambling speeches, could decide to represent himself at the hearing. The Rangel’s trial would undoubtedly attract a lot of attention from the cable news shows.

“It’s like we’re kicking ourselves in the stomach when we’re already
down,” one House Democratic staffer griped. “I’m not looking forward
to it.”

Rangel and his attorney, Leslie Berger Kiernan, and her legal team
parted ways in October, leaving little time before the Nov. 15 trial
for another lawyer to take the case and prepare.

There’s an outside chance that the ethics committee could decide to
postpone Rangel’s hearing because he no longer has legal
representation, a delay some ethics experts say would be fair.

“I don’t see how Rangel’s [trial] can happen since he does not have counsel
and any new lawyer will need time to prepare,” said Melanie Sloan, the
executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington. “It seems nearly certain Rangel’s trial will have to be
postponed — due process concerns.”

Waters is more eager to get her trial done so Sloan anticipates
it will go forward as planned.

“I can’t imagine how delaying would help the Ds,” she said. “I imagine
they will want to get this behind them as quickly as possible.”

Rangel did not return a request for comment and a Waters spokesman
declined to comment. The ethics committee does not discuss internal
decisions about ongoing ethics cases and did not return a request for
comment.

Under committee rules, Lofgren has the sole authority to schedule or
delay the hearings as long as she wants, but other watchdogs said the
ethics committee cannot afford any more bad press related to its
handling of the Rangel and Waters matters.

“[Lofgren] is not at all likely to delay the hearings further,” said
Craig Holman of Public Citizen. “Additional delays would reflect
poorly on the committee itself and provide no benefit to either
congressional caucus.”

Republicans have no sympathy for Democrat’s plight, because, they
argue, their leaders had a choice of whether to move forward with the
trials in July but decided to push them off until after the election for public relations purposes.

They also remember how Democrats capitalized on the 2006 October scandal involving
then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) and inappropriate electronic messages to
former pages. At the time, Democrats said it proved that Republicans had lost
their way on ethics.

“There is no purer symbol of the arrogance of power than Democrats
holding these hearings after the elections,” said Doug Heye, spokesman
for the Republican National Committee. “It perfectly encapsulated why
voters are tired of Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s [D-Calif.] rule.”

Democrats fired back, arguing that the Rangel and Waters ethics issues
hardly compare to scandals during Republican control of the House,
including the Foley scandal, and the wide-ranging corruption probe of Jack Abramoff that
landed the lobbyist and one GOP member (Rep. Bob Ney (Ohio)) in jail and implicated several former aides.

“There is not one shred of evidence that voters are in any way
motivated by these allegations,” said Brandi Hoffine, spokeswoman for
the Democratic National Committee. “…There’s no comparison whatsoever
between these allegations and the scandal-racked Republican Congress
of 2006.”

Some Democrats contacted for this article who declined to speak on the
record lashed out at Republicans for their ethics record.

“It takes a lot of chutzpah coming from the same party that impeached
President Clinton during [a] lame duck [session] and the same GOP
leaders who proudly presided over a non-existent ethics process….Democrats strengthened the house ethics
process, Republicans subverted it,” remarked one Democratic aide.

It’s difficult to quantify just what kind of impact the Rangel and
Waters scandals had on Tuesday’s disappointing Democratic losses, but
longtime political observers argue that ethics scandals are packing more of a
punch in recent years then they had some 10 or 15 years ago.

“We’ve seen in the past when the Democrats took over they found that
the ethics issues were more salient than many believed previously,”
said Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center. “…To some degree
the Republicans have used the Rangel and Waters matters effectively to
paint a picture that the Democrats are not the change they sold us
on.”

McGehee believes that younger voters in their 40s and 50s grew up
watching the Watergate scandal and its fallout and take ethics issues
more seriously than the previous generation.

“As politics has become cleaner – you don’t see the bags of cash being
handed over anymore – there’s still a recognition that politics still
seem to be doing backroom deals even when you pass new rules and laws
[to crack down on it],” she said.

Some Democrats on Capitol Hill strongly reject any notion that the
Rangel and Waters matters had anything to do with individual
Democratic defeats, citing jobs and the difficulty of maintaining a
majority in Congress in a midterm election after controlling all three
branches of government. One aide specifically noted that most of the
ads featured Pelosi, not Rangel and Waters.

“It’s ridiculous to say that,” one Democratic aide shot back.
“If that were the case, there would be ads running all over the
country [highlighting the investigations]. House Republicans made the
conscious decision not to make this a big deal because they have their
own skeletons in their closet…people are concerned about one thing:
jobs.”