Rangel Overstays His Welcome

This week, Rep. Charlie Rangel stepped down as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee due to an ongoing ethics probe. In the end, power can corrupt even the best of us. That is the risk of staying in Washington too long -- for Democrats and Republicans.

Although I have personally never met the man, those who have agree that “to know Charlie Rangel is to like Charlie Rangel.”  And so it is a genuine shame that Mr. Rangel, who this past week had to step down as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee due to an ongoing ethics probe, is but the latest symptom of an elitist syndrome that has infected so many in Congress with a belief that the laws they write somehow do not apply to them.  In a past article I commented on Mr. Rangel’s tax irregularities and will not go through the laundry list again here.  Suffice it to say, it is time for Mr. Rangel to go.

Still, my earlier piece aside, I do see Charlie Rangel as a tragic figure.   His autobiography And I Haven’t Had A Bad Day Since tells an extraordinary tale of an exceptional man.  It is the reflections of a decorated veteran of the Korean War (Bronze Star and Purple Heart); a civil rights activist who marched in Selma with Dr. King;  a street-smart guy who graduated from St. John’s School of Law; practiced law and then became Assistant Attorney General and worked his way up through Harlem politics to serve first in the New York State Assembly and then to ultimately unseat Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. as representative from the 15th congressional district in 1971  -- by exploiting the incumbent's ethics violations of all things (irony alert!).

But perhaps that 1971 number says it all.   Forty years is an awfully long time to spend insulated inside the Beltway!  The ethics probe reveals what can happen to anyone when they have been ensconced in the smoke-filled backroom that is the U.S. Congress for decades without ever once stepping out into the sunlight of the private sector in which the rest of us dwell.  For the other 300 million Americans who aren’t members of Club 535, hiding seven figures of taxable income in two undisclosed checking accounts is an offense punishable by prison.  Mr. Rangel by contrast seems to be getting a slap on the wrist that only a man elected to Congress when I was getting ready for kindergarten could receive from his fellow lawmakers.

Power can corrupt even the best of us -- even men I have come to sincerely admire (if disagree with on policy) like Charlie Rangel.  That is the risk of staying in Washington too long -- Democrat or Republican.  I have always thought that the Constitution is a document that should be fiddled with as little as possible.  Yet Mr. Rangel is the personification of the one big mistake (besides condoning slavery of course) that I think the Framers made: they should have put in term limits so that those who make the laws must one day be cast outside the white city to live under them.  But men like Washington, Franklin, Morris, Madison and the rest never imagined that anyone would willingly subject himself to a life of public service (which they viewed as an unpleasant civic duty) when so many more noble pursuits beckoned.  To be fair, they never got a free junket to the Caribbean either.