Department of What Was He Thinking

July 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics 

This is a profoundly shocking story on many levels — not least among which is the level on which it will be very briefly clucked over before being quickly swept under the carpet.

New York Congressman Charles R. Rangel, the immensely powerful Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee —and, presumably, a man who understands the ways of means— has been occupying four rent-controlled residential apartments in a luxury building in upper Manhattan, and using one of them as a campaign office. This master of budgetary arcanae and minutiae claims he had no idea that he has been getting what, in New York, would be referred to as such a deal.

The Congressman has been living in this building since the early 1970s; and, therefore, while he sat on the House Judiciary Committee’s Impeachment Inquiry which took such a critical interest in some of President Nixon’s real estate.

Usually a critic of landlords’ attempts to evict rent-controlled tenants in order to receive market-rate rents for their apartments, Chairman Rangel has been uncharacteristically silent regarding his own landlord’s controversial activities in that regard.

Mr. Rangel is nothing if not a very skilled survivor, and a couple of hours ago he held a news conference in which he demonstrated his mastery of SOP for a Democrat In Trouble: deny everything; admit nothing; then attack.

Asked by a reporter whether his living arrangements were fair — given that other rent-stabilized apartments who have more than one unit are typically asked to occupy just one — Mr. Rangel replied, “The question of fairness is so subjective.”

The news conference took a turn when Mr. Rangel said he was not aware of tenants legally living in rent-stabilized apartments being evicted.

Several residents angrily accosted Mr. Rangel, saying that he had ignored their complaints about that phenomenon. “I have no knowledge of anyone being evicted that has paid their rent,” he said.

When a Times reporter, David Kocieniewski, pressed Mr. Rangel on the issue of fairness, the congressman declined to answer, saying, “I have decided unilaterally that you have asked more than your share.” He added, when Mr. Kocieniewski tried to press him, “Hell no, I’m not going to respond to you.”

Mr. Rangel said he did have a problem with “people living in rent-stabilized apartments that have moved themselves from the building and lived in other places,” and he said the management of the complex had taken action against such tenants. But he said that residents who legitimately lived in their rent-stabilized units were not being evicted.

As everyone knows, shame will soon be obsolete; what little is left of it today is an inconveniently vestigial throwback. So Chairman Rangel, who is one of the toughest cookies in Congress, showed no hesitation even in shamelessly playing the geezer sympathy card: “The idea that being 78 years old, having two places, one is rent-stabilized, and this is the twilight of my life…”

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