Wonder if they’ll pay attention?
House Democrats had better start taking the ethics allegations against Rep. Charlie Rangel seriously. I know it’s difficult for those steeped in Capitol Hill’s hermetic culture to understand, but a verdict of “mistakes were made” — which a lot of Democrats would like to reach — doesn’t cut it in the real world. Strange as it seems. Seriously…
…But just because Republicans are posturing for political gain doesn’t mean that Democrats can do the same without paying a price. If you win big majorities in both the House and Senate by railing against a “culture of corruption” in Washington, as the Democratic Party did, voters tend to get the wacky notion that you actually mean what you say.
The violations that Rangel is alleged to have committed are, inconveniently for him, easy for anyone to understand. The most serious, perhaps, is the allegation that he failed to pay taxes on about $75,000 in income from renting out a beach house that he owns in the Dominican Republic. For the chairman of the House committee that writes tax legislation not to pay his fair share in taxes would be as bad as, say, for the secretary of the Treasury not to pay his fair share in taxes. Hold it, maybe that’s a bad example…
…The real problem, though, is the overall portrait of a wealthy and privileged congressional pasha to whom ordinary rules don’t apply. It’s a picture that obscures Rangel’s long and tireless work in the House on behalf of the needy and dispossessed. It pains me to see his record tarnished, because I like and admire the guy. But he’s the one who did the tarnishing.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi may owe Rangel her job, but she needs to press the ethics committee to do its work without fear or favor. And she needs to contemplate the prospect of explaining to voters, come next fall, why the affluent man who sets their taxes didn’t pay his.
And that is it, in a nutshell. Even if one wishes to believe that the economy will be significantly better by November of 2010, the fact remains that it won’t be great and a lot of people will still be out of work. When you add to frustration over the economy the fact that the political class is corrupt, you can easily get a tidal wave of political change. Keep in mind that the GOP lost its Congressional majority in the relatively prosperous year of 2006. 8%+ unemployment coupled with Culture of Corruption could swing an election from the expected 25-seat Democrat loss to 50 or more (and I think unemployment will be 10%+ at that time…).
The message from the people is very loud and clear – stop the corruption, stop the back room deals, stop tax, spending and borrowing up in to oblivion. Democrats have preferred to concentrate on un-needed and un-wanted reforms to health care and energy along with preparing to scuttle Afghanistan and various oddities about extended “hate crimes” laws to homosexuals and allowing women to serve on submarines. In addition to this, Democrats have, if anything, become more arrogantly corrupt since they won the whole ball of wax last November – they seem to think they’ve won another 40 year term as majority.
If the Democrats don’t heed the voices of wisdom on their own side, they will head towards catastrophe next year.
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