The House ethics committee voted 9-1 Tuesday to recommend that Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., be censured for 11 rule violations ranging from improper use of congressional stationery to using his influence in Congress to solicit funds for a school named after him. The bipartisan panel also ordered Rangel to reimburse the Internal Revenue Service for taxes he failed to pay on rental income from a vacation villa in the Dominican Republic.
“We have worked together in this matter in a way that has been quite wrenching and we’re satisfied with our conclusion,” Committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said.
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The panel voted after the top ethics committee lawyer recommended censure, citing Rangel’s leadership status in Congress and the breadth of his 11 violations, which outnumbered those of just about every lawmaker who has been punished in the past.
Rangel now faces a bigger jury of his peers. The entire House of Representatives will vote on the censure recommendations after Congress reconvenes from a weeklong Thanksgiving recess and before it adjourns its lame-duck session.
A censure is the most serious punishment the House can mete out short of expulsion. It requires the 20-term lawmaker from Harlem to stand in the well of the House and receive a formal rebuke for his actions.
Only three House lawmakers have ever faced censure, the most recent in 1983, when Reps. Gerry Studds, D-Mass., and Daniel Crane, R-Ill., were rebuked for having affairs with 17-year-old congressional pages.
The committee’s ruling Thursday concluded a two-year investigation into the actions of the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Rangel walked out of his ethics trial Monday, complaining that he did not have time to hire a lawyer. His exit cut short days of testimony that had been expected. The committee continued without him, noting that it already had ample indisputable evidence on which to base its decision to charge Rangel with 11 violations.
Rangel returned Thursday for the punishment phase of the proceedings, sometimes tearful, sometimes defiant, proclaiming that his actions were the result of sloppy bookkeeping not corruption.
“I hope you can see your way clear to indicate any action taken by me was not with the intention of bringing any disgrace on the House or enriching myself personally,” Rangel told the committee.
He argued that his punishment should reflect testimony by ethics committee lawyer Blake Chisam, who said he believed sloppiness, and not corruption, was at the root of Rangel’s actions.
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who is not on the committee but whose status as a hero of the civil rights movement earned him the moniker “conscience of the U.S. Congress” among his colleagues, appeared at the hearing to testify in Rangel’s defense. Lewis pointed to Rangel’s military career, efforts to advance civil rights and his years of public service as evidence of his outstanding character.
But Republicans were less sympathetic and said Rangel at least appeared to have worked to enrich himself by soliciting funds for a namesake school that will archive Rangel’s papers and provide him with office space.
“I guess it is how you define corruption here,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. “I think reasonable people may disagree on that interpretation.”
