Rep. Charlie Rangel, the over-tailored New York Democrat, looked his best today at the health care summit, as he called for reform in his capacity as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “So what I would hope would happen is that we leave here not thinking that we’re going to start all over,” said Rangel. “This is the last year for a whole lot of people in the House of Representatives who we believe we represent the people, too.”
Presumably Rangel was not referring to his own numbered days in office, but he might have been. TIME’s Jay Newton-Small reports that the House Ethics Committee will release a finding Friday that Rangel violated House rules, the result of an ethics investigation of the Bronx Democrat that has lasted more than a year. (In the last quarter of 2009, Rangel spent more than $574,000 on lawyers fighting the charges, much more than he spent on his own campaign.)
It is not yet clear how serious the violation was or whether it will result in just a letter of reprimand or a loss of his chairmanship, or something else. A former Rangel employee, meanwhile, has launched a serious primary challenge, which will no doubt be helped along by these events. Republicans, meanwhile, have long been calling for Rangel’s ouster. As recently as last November, Rangel told the New York Times defiantly, “My credibility has never been challenged except by a couple of reporters.”
The questions about Rangel’s conduct run a wide gamut, from the disclosure that he was renting four rent-stabilized apartments in New York for thousands of dollars below market rates, to the revelation that he had unreported taxable income from a villa in the Dominican Republic, to questions about his fund-raising for an academic center named for him from corporate executives who were lobbying his committee.
UPDATE: The Associated Press reports that the Ethics Committee found that Rangel “knowingly accepted Caribbean trips in violation of House rules that forbid hidden financing by corporations.”