The congressman from the 15th District is Democrat Charles Rangel, first elected to the House in 1970. Rangel had wielded considerable power as chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee until he was forced to step aside on March 3, 2010 as a result of a House Ethics Committee investigation. Later in the year, Rangel was censured for violations of congressional ethics rules.
Rangel grew up in Harlem and served in the Army in Korea, where he rescued 40 men from behind the lines in Kunu-ri and was awarded the Bronze Star. He graduated from New York University and St. John’s University law school, served as legal counsel in several government agencies and was elected to the New York Assembly in 1966. He was part of a group of young black politicians—among them Basil Paterson, Carl McCall, Percy Sutton and Adam Clayton Powell III—who for many years dominated Harlem and greatly influenced New York politics. In 1970, Rangel challenged Powell in the Democratic primary and narrowly won. Remarkably, these two iconic and often controversial figures have been the district’s only representatives for two-thirds of a century. Like most Harlem politicians, Rangel has long argued that government aid and racial preferences are needed to solve Harlem’s problems.
Aside from some early successes on trade and increasing the minimum wage, Rangel’s first two years as chairman in the 110th Congress (2007-08) were stymied by partisan deadlock as his proposals came under veto threat from the Republican White House. In 2009, Rangel said he was eager to “have a head start” in legislative planning for the new administration. “Time is not our friend,” he warned in July 2008, describing the multiple challenges on tax policy, health care and entitlements legislation. With Democrat Barack Obama as president, Rangel moved quickly to enact the long-discussed children’s health insurance expansion, and he helped craft $348 billion in tax cuts over five years in the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill. He also joined other senior House Democrats in extended discussions on health reform. Somewhat less expected was his assertive role on climate change legislation. Environmental legislation traditionally has been under the control of the Energy and Commerce Committee, but Rangel held numerous hearings on a proposed carbon tax.
Rangel’s chairmanship was marred by numerous ethics issues uncovered by The New York Times. The newspaper raised questions about four rent-controlled apartments that Rangel maintained in Harlem and his failure to report rental income from a villa in the Dominican Republic. Perhaps most damaging, The Times reported that Maurice Greenberg, one of the biggest shareholders in financially troubled American International Group, gave a public policy school named for Rangel $5 million in 2007, and that Rangel in early 2008, supported a provision in a tax bill that saved AIG several million dollars a year. Rangel steadfastly denied wrongdoing, and in September 2008, he requested a review by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.
The committee opened an investigation into those allegations. Meanwhile, another issue cropped up: corporate-sponsored trips Rangel took to Antigua, Barbuda and St. Maarten in 2007 and 2008. The panel concluded that Rangel’s staff knew that corporations were helping to finance trips, but failed to reveal that fact when they asked the committee to pre-approve them. Rangel was instructed to reimburse the sponsors for the costs of his travel. Several Democrats, including some prominent lawmakers, were prepared to vote in favor of a Republican resolution seeking to remove Rangel as chairman if the measure came to the floor as expected. Rangel said he wanted to save his fellow Democrats from “having to defend me during their elections” in November, and announced in March 2010 he would take a leave of absence from the chairmanship.
After a nearly two-year investigation, the full committee in July 2010 announced 13 allegations against Rangel. They included his acceptance of the rent-stabilized apartments from a Manhattan developer, failure to pay taxes on rental income from the Dominican villa and his acceptance of contributions for his foundations from companies seeking legislative favors. Rangel acknowledged bookkeeping mistakes and said he failed to properly oversee his finances, but argued that he did nothing to personally benefit or enrich himself. Still, in November, the committee ruled there was sufficient evidence to support the allegations. Before the decision, Rangel indignantly walked out of the proceedings claiming he could no longer afford legal representation and that it was unfair to continue. Two days later, the panel voted 9 to 1 in favor of censure, a form of punishment just short of expulsion in which a member is shamed by a public recitation of rules violations on the floor of the House. Rangel’s friends and allies, and Rangel himself, lobbied for a milder form of punishment called a reprimand. But on Dec. 2, the House voted 333 to 79 for censure. Rangel stood in the well of the House, his hands clasped behind him, while Speaker Pelosi read a resolution censuring him for bringing discredit to the House. Censure of a member of Congress is rare. The last time it happened was 1983, when Reps. Daniel Crane, R-Ill., and Gerry Studds, D-Mass., were censured for carrying on sexual relationships with congressional pages. After his rebuke, Rangel addressed the chamber briefly, saying, “I know in my heart I am not going to be judged by this Congress. I’ll be judged by my life in its entirety.”
Rangel’s fall from grace was particularly striking given his history as a savvy legislator. When he was on his game, Rangel displayed an effective combination of political shrewdness and personal charm even allowing for his occasional rhetorical extravagance. When a bipartisan majority voted to end racial preferences in broadcasting in 1995, Rangel lashed out in a letter to then-Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer, R-Texas, saying, “Just like under Hitler, people say they don’t mean to blame any particular individuals and groups, but in the U.S. those groups always turn out to be minorities and immigrants.” Archer refused to speak to Rangel, then the ranking member of the committee, except in public forums. During the 1990s, Rangel defended President Bill Clinton against impeachment with great vigor, but he did not always get along with Clinton. And he resented it when the administration negotiated directly with Republicans, leaving him and other congressional Democrats out of the loop.
Republican Bill Thomas of California succeeded Archer as chairman. With a notoriously acerbic tongue, Thomas made few if any moves toward a legislative partnership with Rangel. In 2003, a Ways and Means meeting on pension legislation ended in chaos when Democrats led by Rangel walked out in protest, charging they hadn’t had time to review a substitute bill the committee was considering. Thomas called the Capitol Police to remove the Democrats from the library where they had gathered, and in their absence, Republicans approved the bill by voice vote. Rangel later offered a resolution to nullify the meeting and chastised Thomas, but dropped the effort after Thomas went to the House floor and made a tearful apology. Yet the committee was never able to work in a bipartisan way. Rangel also protested when Thomas excluded him from the House-Senate conference committee on the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug bill. The only Democrats Thomas allowed in were Senate Finance Committee members Max Baucus of Montana and John Breaux of Louisiana, who favored Thomas’s bill.
Rangel has opposed some of the international free-trade agreements of recent years, but has proven open to compromise on others. After becoming chairman in 2007, Rangel moved to have the full committee, not the Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee, handle trade agreements. The subcommittee was chaired by liberal Democrat Sander Levin of Michigan, who has taken a harder line on labor and environmental provisions. In 2000, Rangel worked hard for a bill to cut tariffs on apparel and other imports from sub-Saharan Africa, despite opposition from labor unions, textile interests and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus. During 2004, Rangel did not take a position on the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement, though many Democrats opposed the agreement. There are many Dominican and Central American immigrants in New York. After an earthquake devastated an already destitute Haiti in January 2010, Rangel sponsored a trade bill allowing the country to export more apparel to the United States. The bill passed the House and was signed into law by Obama in May 2010.
One of Rangel’s top priorities has been a permanent change in the alternative minimum tax to prevent it from ensnaring middle-class taxpayers. His best chance of getting such a major tax bill through Congress was as chairman of Ways and Means, and that opportunity has passed him by. Over the years, he helped write several bills to help high-poverty areas like Harlem, including the federal empowerment zone law, the low-income housing tax credit and the 1993 increases in the earned income tax credit. Earlier in his House career, Rangel’s main emphasis was curbing the illegal drug trade.
On foreign policy, Rangel has long advocated eliminating sanctions on trade with Cuba. He favors allowing Haitian and Dominican immigrants into the United States on the same basis as refugees from Cuba. Rangel voted against the Iraq war resolution in 2002 and the following year called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Late in 2002, he called for a revival of the military draft, contending that “a disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the military, while the most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent.” He introduced a bill in 2003 to require some form of national service, military or civilian, from Americans ages 18 to 26, and found 13 cosponsors. When House Republican leaders brought it to a vote in October 2004, he called it a “political maneuver to kill rumors of the president’s intention to reinstate the draft after the November election” and voted against it, saying it had had no committee hearings. It was voted down 402-2.
Rangel has long been a major player in New York’s city and state politics. He strongly backed his old friend, Democrat Carl McCall, for governor in 2002, and in December 2001, he said he would vote for Republican George Pataki if the nomination went to McCall’s rival, Democrat Andrew Cuomo. In the 2008 presidential contest, Rangel was an early and vocal supporter of home-state Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in her pitched battle with Obama for the Democratic nomination. “This ain’t no time for a beginner,” he told The New York Times, referring to Obama’s relative inexperience in the Senate. Despite pressure from many Democrats, including many of his constituents, he stuck with Clinton until she withdrew from the race.
For the most part, Rangel has been easily re-elected every two years. In 1994, he faced primary opposition from the son of his predecessor, New York City Councilman Adam Clayton Powell IV. Rangel spent $1.4 million and won 61%-33%. When he was sorely weakened in 2010 by the ethics case, Powell challenged him again in the Democratic primary, along with four other opponents. The election was a referendum on Rangel’s ethics and continued fitness for office, but in the end, the results weren’t even close. Rangel won the September primary, which assured his success in the general election, with 51% of the vote to Powell’s 23%.
Rangel got another tough primary challenge in 2012. Rangel ran in a redrawn 13th District with a larger Hispanic population. In a five-way primary, his closest competitor was New York State Sen. Adriano Espaillat. A much younger candidate from Washington Heights, Espaillat hoped to become the first Dominican-American member of Congress. Despite ethics questions, Rangel still received some establishment support, including endorsements from House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y. (Though President Obama noticeably withheld support). Espaillat ran on a mantle of change. He pointed out that when Rangel initially ran for Congress, a man first walked on the moon, while “Joe Namath was throwing touchdown passes, and Nixon was president.” But many of Rangel’s surrogates argued that the incumbent’s seniority and experience could still be valuable in the House. And with incumbency comes money and boots on the ground. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Rangel raised more than $1 million, while former Bill Clinton aide Clyde Williams brought in $362,000 and Espaillat raised about $333,000. The unofficial early returns showed Rangel with 45%, while Espaillat finished second with 39%. Espaillat conceded the race. However, as the final votes were tallied, Rangel's lead narrowed. Espaillat's campaign filed a lawsuit claiming that too many ballots were left outstanding. Four days after the Tuesday election, New York City's Board of Elections released new numbers showing Rangel leading, 44%-42%. 802 votes separated the two candidates, with approximately 3,000 votes unaccounted for.
