Charlie Rangel's A Crook

Not even his own party could gag down his behavior.

Facing potential midterm election losses and a stuck-in-the-mud legislative program, Democrats can now add to their worries the ethics problems of chief House tax writer Rep. Charles Rangel.

The House ethics committee accused Rangel on Thursday of accepting corporate money for trips to Caribbean conferences in violation of House rules. The committee said it couldn’t determine whether Rangel knew about the financing, but found that his staff did — and concluded Rangel was responsible for learning the truth.

Ironically, as the ethics committee was finalizing its report, the New York Democrat was attending President Barack Obama’s bipartisan summit in an attempt to rescue the party’s health care bill.

Rangel’s case is certain to raise questions of whether the 20-term lawmaker, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, can retain his post in an election year.

The Ways and Means chairmanship is especially important this year, when Democrats are trying to overhaul the nation’s health care system and Congress has to decide what to do about billions of dollars in tax cuts Americans at every income level have enjoyed for a decade — but are due to expire in December.

If this was Rangel’s only ethics problem, it might not be crippling to Democrats. But still looming is a much larger ethics investigation. That one is focusing in part on Rangel’s use of official stationery to raise money for a college center in his name; and his belated financial disclosure of hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously unreported assets and income.

The unreported assets included a federal credit union account worth between $250,001 and $500,000; a Merrill Lynch account valued between $250,000 and $500,000; tens of thousands of dollars in municipal bonds and $30,000 to $100,000 in rent from a multifamily brownstone building in New York.