Charlie Rangel Censured

The House voted yesterday to censure Charlie Rangel for 11 ethics violations. The vote was 333 to 79, with two Republicans voting against censure.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20024507-503544.html

After 40 years in Congress, Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) was censured Thursday by his peers for 11 violations of House ethics rules. With the censure, Rangel joined the same page in the history books as 22 other House members, including Gerry Studds and Daniel Crane who were the last members to be censured in 1983, for sexual misconduct with House pages.

These were just some of Rangel's offenses that the ethics committee found him guilty of committing: Failing to pay back taxes on income from a villa in the Dominican Republic; soliciting donations to a school of public service bearing his name from donors with business before his committee; using congressional resources, such as letterhead, to solicit those donations; improperly using a rent-controlled apartment in New York as a campaign office.

Here is video of the censure.





If the player doesn't work, try this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDsRSSrnDR4


Did you watch the video? That's their idea of a "severe" punishment.


And, of course, as soon as he was censured he stood up and said "I didn't deserve this harsh punishment!" Okay, so he didn't use those words, but he DID get that message across.

But if you wanted a stark example of how out of touch Congress is with the rest of the country, this should do it. A sitting Congressmen gets caught "forgetting" to pay taxes, and his punishment is to pay the taxes he owes and to have the rest of the House waggled their collective finger at him. Oooh... I had no idea that they risked so much!

In another post yesterday dealing with ethics reform on a state level, a reader commented the following... and I think it applies well to Congress, too.

"bring everyone into a room and announce that a single violation terminates your political career, ends your ability vote in any Bama election, ends your ability to procure a hunting & fishing license, and requires you to pay back the previous salary from the day you performed the ethics violation to that day convicted. We need to make ethics something that you'd think about everyday you walk into a state legislative area or a county commission area."

Yeah, I can get behind that.