By all accounts, this will be a bad week for Representative Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), the octogenarian who has pounded the halls of Capitol Hill on behalf of Harlem for four decades. On Thursday, July 29, he and the nation will finally hear all of the charges that the House Ethics Committee has racked up against him in a two-year investigation of his professional conduct and personal finances.
We already know that the ethics probe has touched on charges so serious that Democratic leaders forced Mr. Rangel—who has been a mentor to most of the current leadership—to take a “leave of absence” from his duties as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. We also know that, as the nation’s chattering classes in DC and New York rush to the airwaves and blogosphere this week to proclaim the ethics probe a threat to the Democrats’ hopes of holding the House in the midterm elections, the leadership will come under pressure from the already gun shy Democratic Caucus to expel Mr. Rangel from Congress.
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If Rangel survives the daggers of his colleagues in the House, he remains an odds-on favorite to win re-election in the fall. This fact has caused great consternation among some pundits who would cast a Rangel victory in November as a loss for Harlem, and perhaps the larger black community as well. This is so, as Javier David pointed out in a recent piece, because several ethically challenged politicians have won re-election from majority-black constituencies in recent years.
While there is no doubt that voters in Harlem should carefully weigh the benefits and costs of continuing to support Mr. Rangel in the fall, it is certainly unclear at this point that he belongs classed with the worst political miscreants of our age. Indeed, even if he loses his case before the House, it is unlikely that he will face criminal charges of any kind in the future.
What is clear is that Mr. Rangel has been a tireless advocate for Harlem and all black Americans during his tenure in the House. In the 1980s, Rangel began to use his position on the Ways and Means Committee to steer billions of dollars to hospitals, schools, and affordable housing in depressed urban areas. In the 1990s, Rangel pushed for the creation of tax incentives that helped expand opportunities for low-income individuals seeking home mortgages. Rangel has also been an outspoken critic of police brutality and racial profiling in New York throughout his career.
In light of Mr. Rangel’s extraordinary record of service to Harlem and the nation—he won a Bronze Star Medal for saving the lives of 40 men during the Korean War!—perhaps we should not be so quick to judge the voters in his district harshly if they feel like he continues to be their best option on Capitol Hill. After all, no matter what happens with the ethics committee at the end of this week, Mr. Rangel has already cemented a positive legacy in Harlem. This legacy is the line that separates Mr. Rangel from other notable cases in American politics.
