It’s hard to believe the House Ethics Committee could be caught off guard by Charlie Rangel, but that sure looks like what just happened.
The committee lawyer began to make his case, at which point the proceeding degenerated into a long diatribe by Rangel against the committee relating to Rangel not being able to afford legal counsel. He lost his lawyers, he claims, because they weren’t confident in his ability to pay legal fees beyond the $2 million he says he already had racked up.
Rangel also claimed that he’d only recently discovered that he could form a legal defense fund to pay for counsel, and suggested it was unconscionable for the committee to proceed with the hearing while Rangel is unrepresented. At that point he declared he was leaving the hearing room. Read More
Ethics Committee goes into executive session to decide whether to proceed with Rangel hearing.
The House Ethics Committee hearing on Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is quickly descending into a zoo. Rangel just finished answering some procedural questions from the committee chair, and committee counsel proffered evidence to the committee, at which point Rangel launched into a lengthy objection to the proceedings.
Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) just entered the Ethic Committee hearing room and it appears — as had been speculated — that he’ll be representing himself in this adjudicatory proceeding. He fired his lawyers in October, and there had been no word on whom he hired in their place. But it looks like Rangel is about to give his opening statement to committee himself.
The full details are not in yet. But it appears that Nancy Pelosi has come to an agreement with current Majority Whip James Clyburn that will have him taking a yet-to-be-named number three position in the Democratic House leadership in the 112th Congress.
That means Pelosi is leader, Hoyer is whip and John Larson, the Caucus chair who seemed most likely to get cut in any deal, remains Caucus chair in the next Congress.
In other words, the musical chairs crisis created by the fact that there are four leadership slots in the majority and three in the minority has been solved by creating a fourth slot in minority too. Ingenious. It sounds like Charlie Rangel gets his wish.
We’ve put together a slideshow of TPM and the people who’ve made it possible over the last ten years.
Below is the Starbucks at Connecticut and R in Washington, DC, circa 2002, that’s often referred to as TPM’s first HQ. That’s, shall we say, a bit of an overstatement. But I did spend a lot of time working there (also bought more than enough ice coffee to do so legitimately). David Kurtz was just remarking that for a new media operation, surprisingly little of the site’s history has been documented visually. But we’ve got some very special pictures here, including some great pics from election night 2008 at the old TPM HQ.
FBI nabs Maryland county executive and his wife (who just got elected to the county council) in bribery scheme.
US opposition leaders don’t usually tell foreign heads of state that they’ll help the foreign leader provide a check on the American president. And they certainly don’t announce it to the press.
But that does seem to be what Eric Cantor just did with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. As Ron Kampeas at the Jewish Telegraph Agency put it, he couldn’t “remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the president.”
Cantor’s spokesman says Kampeas overinterpreted the statement. But if he did, it wasn’t by much. Read for yourself.