Indian Summer of a Biped

House Democrats must be squirming a bit to have to defend—or at least not attack—Charlie Rangel while the party of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay go after the Harlem congressman for his extensive list of financial ‘lapses’. What Rangel did is inexcusable, but he is the chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, a 40-year House veteran, a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, a top campaign money-raiser for Democratic colleagues and apparently a fun guy. [Full disclosure: he’s also my congressman.]

It’s not going to get any easier as the Democratic members of the ethics panels now poring through Rangel’s finances try to imagine how somebody who helps write the nation’s tax laws could fail to recall a half-million dollars of assets around April 15 of last year.

Or how he managed to keep four rent-stabilized apartments in New York when we mortals without powerful friends can only dream of one.

Or why he thought it was okay to hustle donations for his namesake institute (the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service) in pitch letters written on official House stationery and sent to people doing business before his committee.

Et cetera.

The real question in my mind, however, answers itself: why aren’t his own constituents up in arms about Rangel’s hanky-panky? Well, doh, they (we) are hoping for a piece of the action. In which case, all the sleaze and complicity with the exploiting banks, rapacious insurance companies and Wall Street thieves are forgiven.

Not that we upper Manhattanites are more corrupt than the rest of the country. No, we’re exactly like you, and therein, to my mind, lies the problem.

Our legislative branch has descended into a cattle market of legalized bribery by which those with deep pockets more or less brazenly purchase the needed votes. I won’t bore myself trying to document this nasty fact as it has been exposed repeatedly—and to no effect—for years with voluminous examples.

Just two election cycles ago, turncoat Joe Lieberman, once a Democratic candidate for vice president, was returned to the Senate by Connecticut voters. Constituents interviewed at the time returned again and again to the fact that Lieberman had brought home much juicy bacon in defense contracts for the otherwise liberal state, and that was enough for them.

Lieberman proceeded to deliver a stirring endorsement speech for John McCain at the Republican convention and do everything he could to bring Sarah Palin’s gun-toting anti-abortion crowds to within a whisper of the White House. Thanks, Joe!

In my own neighborhood a little north of Harlem, the trash cans on the street bear a reminder that they were ‘sponsored by Council Member Miguel Martínez’, which always annoyed me as I thought it was Council Member Martínez’s job to do that with our money.

I raised the trashcan issue with the Times city columnist Clyde Haberman just last month after said councilman was indicted for channeling city non-profit funds to relatives. Haberman agreed in principle but suggested that Martínez’s name might be exactly where it belonged—on a trash can.

I don’t see Charlie Rangel getting to enjoy his powerful perch much longer, but the disease he represents isn’t going to be cured by bouncing him back to Frederick Douglass Boulevard. It’s deeper, more structural and frankly more genetic than just one guy’s hubris.