An upcoming trial for Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., on 13 charges of financial and other misconduct highlights a double standard between regular citizens and members of Congress, congressional ethics experts say.
Timeline of alleged ethical violations by Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y. July 2008: Rangel asks the House ethics committee if his use of congressional letterhead to raise money for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York violated House rules.
July 2008: The New York Times reports Rangel illegally used three rent-controlled apartments provided by a company owned in part by a campaign donor. The difference between what Rangel paid in rent and the market value of the apartments exceeded $30,000 a year. An expert told the Times this could be construed as violating House rules forbidding representatives from accepting gifts in excess of $100.
August 2008: The New York Post reports Rangel’s tax filings show no income on his Caribbean villa, even though it was being rented. Shortly afterward, Rangel pays back taxes of $10,800 owed on $75,000 in rental income.
September 2008: The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct announces it will investigate Rangel’s alleged tax avoidance and illegal use of apartments — and, according to CBS, “questionable storage of a late-model Mercedes Benz in the House [of Representatives] garage.” Rangel’s Mercedes has been stored there for years, according to congressional aides. The spaces are valued at $290 a month and must be reported to the IRS.
November 2008: The New York Times reports Rangel took a “homestead” tax break on his D.C. house while simultaneously occupying the four rent-controlled apartments in New York, “possibly violating laws and regulations in both cases.”
November 2008: Congressional Republicans ask the House panel to look into Rangel’s defense of a tax loophole for a company that had donated a million dollars to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service. Rangel had previously opposed the same loophole in 2004. The House Ethics Committee said this affair would be included in the investigation.
December 2008: It’s revealed Rangel paid $80,000 in campaign funds to his son to create a Web site for his political action committee. The Sunlight Foundation noted the Web site was amateurish, contained a number of embarrassing spelling errors and likely cost a fraction of the $80,000 Rangel’s son was paid to create it.
May 2009: The National Legal and Policy Center files an ethics complaint against Rangel for taking trips to the Caribbean sponsored by a nonprofit foundation funded by a number of corporations with business before the House Ways and Means Committee, which Rangel chairs.
August 2009: Rangel amends his 2007 financial disclosure form to declare more than $500,000 in unreported assets, including significant amounts of stock. Rangel also failed to pay taxes on two properties in New Jersey.
February 2010: The House ethics committee formally admonishes Rangel for violating congressional gift policy by accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean. Rangel is forced to repay the money. Rangel blames his staff for the oversight.
July 2010: The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct charges Rangel with 13 violations of House ethics rules. Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, chairman of the investigative subcommittee looking into RangelÕs charges, tells reporters the subcommittee is recommending a reprimand by the full House Ñ a symbolic punishment. “Generally speaking, Congress is much more deferential to their fellow members than, say, an Internal Revenue Service agent is to a member of the general public,” said Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation. “Imagine if instead of the IRS, it’s your neighbors who will say, ‘You know, you’re a good guy, we’re not going to charge you for your taxes’ — that’s really the way it works.”
Allison noted that statements by at least one member of House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, which brought the charges against Rangel and will conduct his trial later this year, seem to bolster the impression that members of Congress are inclined go easy on their colleagues.
“One of the most difficult tasks assigned to a member of Congress is to sit in judgment of a colleague,” Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, chairman of the subcommittee investigating Rangel, said last week. “The task is even more difficult when the subject of the investigation has befriended and mentored so many new member of Congress.”
Green also told reporters the subcommittee was recommending a reprimand by the full house — a vote by the House in which members would either approve or disapprove of Rangel’s behavior. Other than public shaming, a reprimand imposes no concrete penalty on the erring congressman.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., for example, has been previously reprimanded, but is currently chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.
Rangel is accused of using his congressional authority to solicit donations and to enrich himself personally, but the 13 charges he now faces from the House panel do not address media reports that he failed to report income and failed to disclose assets properly on his congressional financial disclosure forms.
Last year, the Sunlight Foundation claimed to have documented 28 instances in which “Rangel omitted assets worth between $239,026 and $831,000 that were either purchased, sold, or held from his financial disclosures.”
Though evidence of Rangel’s tax evasion has been highly publicized since 2008, the IRS has taken no action against Rangel. “I help people every day fighting the IRS on circumstances much less compelling than those of Mr. Rangel,” Alan J. Dlugash, a partner in the New York accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP, recently told the Hill.
According to Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a lack of IRS action is no excuse for Congress not taking the accusations of tax evasion into account.
“Their argument is the typical argument of the ethics committee. ‘Well, we’re here to enforce House rules, not every law of the land,’ ” he said. “That is why I believe this is turning a blind eye to sweeping House rules with requirements that you conduct yourself as a member of the House, and in such a way that you obey the law.”
