Pat Dollard

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The rock in one shoe

Rangel Hits Obama Closer to Home

by Gerald F. Seib – (WSJ)

It certainly didn’t take long for scandal to rear its ugly head in the new era of Democratic control. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich saw to that, and in spectacular fashion.

But while most attention is fixed on the Blagojevich scandal — coming as it does in President-elect Barack Obama’s home state and replete as it is with enough tape-recorded talk of peddling a Senate seat, shaking down contributors and blackmailing journalists to make even FBI agents blush — it may not be the most troublesome one for the new president.

His more vexing problem could turn out to be that other, quieter scandal dogging Democrats. That’s the one involving Rep. Charles Rangel, head of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Rep. Rangel is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for failing to pay taxes on $75,000 in income on a vacation home in the Dominican Republic, for controlling multiple rent-controlled apartments in a Harlem apartment building, for using congressional stationery to raise money for a center named in his honor and, most recently and seriously, for helping a donor to his center win a tax loophole in return for a contribution.

Rep. Rangel has repeatedly and vociferously denied any wrongdoing, and he actually sought the Ethics Committee inquiry initially to clear his name.

Without doubt, the Blagojevich scandal is more audacious, and, because it involves the filling of Mr. Obama’s own Senate seat, might seem more potentially damaging to the new president. More broadly, it’s possibly a sign that Illinois could become to President Obama what Arkansas was to President Bill Clinton: a source of continuing political headaches back home.

Yet in many ways, the very fact that Gov. Blagojevich’s behavior seems so over the top makes it easier for Mr. Obama to deal with it. He can simply ask, as he has, that the governor quit and go away. It helps the Obama cause enormously, of course, that Gov. Blagojevich is on tape cursing the president-elect’s team for failing to go along with his pay-to-play scheme for filling the Senate seat, and that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald virtually cleared the Obama team in his public remarks on the case.

More than that, whatever ties Gov. Blagojevich and his cohorts may have had to Mr. Obama in the past, they will have little to do with his future in Washington.

Not so Rep. Rangel. For Mr. Obama, the Blagojevich investigation and prosecution soon will be something going on back home. The Rangel drama will play out right in the president-elect’s new front yard. And while Gov. Blagojevich has little to say about the fate of the Obama legislative agenda, Rep. Rangel has a lot to say about that as long as he runs the Ways and Means Committee, wellspring of both tax and health legislation.

“A huge amount of the high-priority agenda of the Obama administration will work its way through the Ways and Means Committee,” says Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Not having a strong chairman is clearly a liability.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had hoped the Rangel inquiry could play out quickly, by Jan. 3. And the Ethics Committee seemed on course to do exactly that, until the latest allegations surfaced. Those regard the tax loophole worked out for a donor to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York.

When that issue arose in a report in the New York Times in recent days, the Democratic hope of an Ethics Committee resolution by the first week of the new year went up in smoke. Democratic aides now say the inquiry could last through January. At its conclusion, the Ethics Committee will report back to the full House on what it has found and make its recommendation, which could range from suggesting no action to a censure of the congressman to a call for expulsion.

Meanwhile, Democrats in the House sense that Republican blood lust is running high on the Rangel front. After enduring years of their own congressional scandal embarrassments, Republicans are delighted to see the shoe on the other foot.

In fact, Republicans seem to be trying to clear away their own scandal detritus as they prepare for this new era. Alaska Rep. Don Young, under investigation in a corruption probe in his home state, has been pushed out as the senior Republican on the Natural Resources Committee. Democrats note, though, that Republicans haven’t taken a similar step with Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, the senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, who is under investigation for ties to a lobbyist whose clients have benefited from government contracts.

The betting among House Democrats is that Rep. Rangel will survive. Mr. Mann of Brookings agrees: Unless the Ethics Committee report is scathing, “since Rangel is widely liked and respected, he’d probably survive and carry on.”

In any case, Mr. Mann notes, House leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, will have a big say in pushing the Obama legislative agenda regardless of who runs which committee. Still, Rep. Rangel figures to have a lot more to do with Mr. Obama’s new life in Washington than will Gov. Blagojevich.