How has House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fulfilled her vaunted promise to “drain the swamp” and preside over the “most ethical Congress in history”? By shrugging her shoulders, downplaying the gravity of myriad ethics charges against Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel and waiting for the “political chips” to “fall where they may.”
At a press conference to preempt the bipartisan House ethics panel’s announcement of 13 ethics and federal regulation charges against Rangel on Thursday afternoon, Pelosi claimed to take “great pride” in her swamp-draining record.
Unblinkingly, she cited the House trial against Rangel as proof that the “process” is working.
But that beleaguered panel has been pathetically understaffed, has dragged its feet for two years on the Rangel case and has administered more halfhearted wrist-slaps than all the pushover parents on a season of “Nanny 911.”
Clinging bitterly to the moral-equivalence card, Pelosi carped about Bush-era GOP corruption.
Her lips were sealed, however, on the wheeling and dealing behind the scenes between Rangel’s lobbyist-funded lawyers and the ethics panel on a deal to avoid a congressional trial.
A full-blown public trial would thoroughly air his self-dealing, habitual bad-faith failures to report income, multiple House gift-ban and solicitation-ban violations, the flouting of franking privilege and letterhead rules, and a fundamental “pattern of indifference or disregard for the laws, rules and regulations of the United States and House of Representatives,” as the House ethics statement of violations put it.
But, hey, what about that GEORGE W. BUSH, eh, Pelosi?
Bush-whack all you want. Along the way, Rangel has obstructed House investigators, failed to produce documents and refused settlement offers — prompting House Ethics Investigative Subcommittee member Rep. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.) to reject the Rangel-as-victim narrative. Misfortune didn’t befall Rangel. He chose his path.
There is nothing sudden about the entitlement sclerosis that took hold of his career.
And there is nothing ethical about the Democratic enablers who have shown their own long pattern of indifference or disregard for clean, open, transparent government.
In March, Pelosi was minimizing Rangel’s mountain of alleged transgressions by pooh-poohing that “it was a violation of the rules of the House. It was not something that jeopardized our country in any way.”
GOP Rep. Mike McCaul, a House ethics investigative subcommittee member, begged to differ. “Credibility is what’s at stake here, the very credibility of the House itself,” he said at the hearing announcing the baker’s dozen of ethics charges.
Echoing Pelosi’s nonchalance, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters sniffed that “many members” of the House are as habitually sloppy and apathetic toward House ethics rules as Rangel — her friend and Congressional Black Caucus ally.
Since Day One, the identity-politics caucus that Rangel helped found has stood by his side and blamed anti-black bias for Rangel’s troubles. Rangel likened media scrutiny of his shady rent-controlled apartment deals and tax troubles to a “lynching.”
CBC member Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) called it a “witch hunt.” And an unidentified, tinfoil-hatted black House Democrat told Politico: “It looks as if there is somebody out there who understands what the rules [are] and sends names to the ethics committee with the goal of going after the [CBC].”
Never mind that the supposedly bigoted House ethics panel exonerated four CBC members of their participation in corporate-funded tax junkets to the Caribbean.
As deal-making efforts between Rangel and the foxes guarding the congressional henhouse continue, more and more Americans are coming to the same conclusions: Voters, not Washington politicians, are the ultimate ethics committee.
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