It's not bad enough that Charles Rangel (D-New York) has played fast and loose with House ethics and used his government position to enrich himself, but now there's another Democrat facing ethics charges in the U.S. House -- Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California).
A House Ethics Committee investigative panel has charged Rep. Waters, who is on the House Financial Services Committee, with pressuring Treasury Department officials to meet with executives from OneUnited Bank (the largest minority-owned bank in the country) during the height of the financial crises. As a result of that meeting the bank received about $12 million in bailout funds.
Now that might not seem so bad except for one thing -- Rep. Water's husband was a board member and stockholder of the bank at that time. Rep. Waters is denying that she did anything wrong and says she did not personally and financially gain from her actions. That defense rings a bit hollow since her husband obviously did gain from her actions (and any gain for her husband would have to be considered a gain for her).
Making matters even worse is the fact that she knew the action would be ethically questionable before she did it. She went to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), chairman of the Financial Services Committee, before taking any action on the matter and discussed it with him. Rep. Frank told her it involved a "conflict of interest" and advised her to "stay out of it".
Frankly I'm shocked that she went ahead and violated House ethics even after being warned. Her extremely poor decision can do nothing but tarnish, what up to now, had been a distinguished career as a legislator. What the hell was she thinking? There is little doubt that she would have blasted a Republican for doing the same thing.
Distinguished careers or not, both Waters and Rangel are guilty of violating House ethics rules (more than once for Rangel) and should be severely punished. When the Democrats regained power in the 2008 election they promised to clean up corruption on Capitol Hill, and they now cannot look the other way because these two representatives are Democrats.
Both Waters and Rangel are demanding a trial before the House Ethics Committee. That is sad because all they are doing is hurting their own party right before the elections. They should just resign and retire (and both are past a normal retirement age). But they won't, so they must be dealt with harshly -- by Democrats as well as Republicans. Anything less is not acceptable and will just further tarnish the reputation of all House members.
I haven't followed the careers or either Rangel or Waters all that closely, but a few years ago when I was writing about then-Congressman (soon-to-be-stomped-into-the-desert-dust Senate candidate) JD Hayworth, he was on every list of the "most corrupt members of Congress."
ReplyDeleteSo was Waters.
Sad to say, Waters was on all of the same lists.
Her issues are no surprise; it was just a matter of time.
there should be a ..clean up rule of law...when the house and senate are so full of thieves we can just clean house..get rid of them all and start all over.
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