

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., was censured by the House in 2010 for ethics violations. / Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP

Note: This post has been updated to clarify why House Speaker John Boehner was named in the lawsuit.






The lawsuit doesn't allege any wrongdoing by Boehner. Democrats controlled the chamber and the ethics panel at the time of Rangel's censure. In the complaint, Rangel named Boehner as a defendant because he says it would be up to Boehner to purge the censure from the Congressional Record.

In December 2010, the House voted 333-79 to censure Rangel for multiple ethical misdeeds - including failing to pay taxes for 17 years on rental income from his villa in the Dominican Republic and soliciting donations from companies with business before the Ways and Means Committee while he was chairman. The donations were going to a center being built in Rangel's honor at the City College of New York.


It was a stunning fall for Rangel, who has spent more than four decades in Congress and once chaired the powerful tax-writing committee. He had lost the chairmanship earlier in 2010 in a separate ethics case involving accepting corporate-funded trips to the Caribbean in violation of House rules.

Rangel remained defiant when running for another term in 2010. He easily defeated five Democratic primary challengers that year and went on to win re-election.

Cases like Rangel's are "almost unheard of," said Kenneth Gross, a Washington lawyer who specializes in political spending and ethics. "But as far as Congressman Rangel is concerned, the stakes are high because this has to do with his legacy."

One of the best-known challenges of Congress' authority to punish its own members involves Adam Clayton Powell, the scandal-plagued Harlem congressman that Rangel defeated in 1970.

In 1967, Powell's House colleagues denied him his seat after a criminal contempt violation and allegations that he misused public funds. Powell's legal challenge, which named then-House speaker John McCormack, other lawmakers and several congressional staffers, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices ruled in 1969 that Congress acted unconstitutionally when it excluded Powell from the U.S. House of Representatives.

Copyright 2014

Read the original story: Rep. Rangel sues Boehner to overturn House censure


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