Rangel Steps Down: Who’s Next?

Charlie Rangel today announced he’ll temporarily lay down the gavel to the Ways & Means Committee, Congress’s top tax writing panel, after being admonished by the Ethics committee for two corporate sponsored trips to the Caribbean. So, the question is: who succeeds him? ABC News reported that Michigan’s Sander Levin, the No. 3 Democrat on the panel would get the chairmanship. Levin’s got obvious tie to unions and Detroit, a linkage that didn’t seem to handicap John Dingell at the helm of the Energy and Commerce Committee for so many years, but Dingell wasn’t writing corporate tax laws. The No. 2 on the panel, Pete Stark, is a long time advocate for health care reform but doesn’t exactly have the, um, temperament for such a high profile job. The No. 4 is Jim McDermott, who also has a history of rash decisions. No 5 is civil rights legend John Lewis who brings the gravitas, if not the passionate wonkishness needed for a life steeped in IRS codes. Which leaves No. 6, Massachusetts’s Richard Neal, whom Rangel has been grooming for the past year as his heir apparent. The problem, as Bloomberg News’ Ryan Donmoyer notes, is how to get to Neal without pissing off four very senior members of the caucus? On the other hand, a weak Ways & Means Committee means that the Senate Finance Committee drives all tax policy: more power to ya, Max Baucus.