House Speaker Pelosi denies Republican calls for Rep. Rangel ouster from Ways and Means Committee

Left to right, Reps. Pelosi, Rangel, Sen. Durbin
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From: Judicial Watch

Pelosi Blows Off Calls To Oust Rangel

Wed, 09/10/2008 - 15:49 — Judicial Watch Blog

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is ignoring calls from fellow lawmakers to remove a veteran Democrat representative, who has repeatedly violated ethics rules and used his office to raise money from corporations with business before him, as chair of a powerful tax-writing committee.

In a hard-hitting letter signed by several outraged congressional colleagues, Pelosi is told that as Speaker of the House she must insist that Charles Rangel, who has represented Harlem for nearly four decades, step down from his House Ways and Means Committee chairmanship pending an investigation into his ethical lapses.

Given Chairman Rangel’s continuing ethical lapses, the letter says, he cannot effectively carry out is duties as committee chair. Rangel’s latest violation, exposed by the media this week, evidently pushed his colleagues to finally call for his ouster from the prestigious committee which actually writes the federal tax code.

It turns out that the self-proclaimed champion of the poor has for decades excluded rental income—$75,000 in 20 years—from a luxurious Caribbean villa on federal and state tax returns. He also failed to mention the earnings on congressional financial disclosure forms which are sworn statements.

A few months earlier, Rangel was exposed by his hometown newspaper for having four extremely rare rent-stabilized apartments in New York—a violation of state and city regulations as well as House ethics rules—even though he regularly criticizes his district’s lack of affordable housing.

In the same week, news reports revealed that Rangel used his congressional office to solicit millions of dollars in donations from corporations with business interests before his panel. The money, about $30 million, will be used for a new academic center that will be named after him and eventually house his papers when he retires. Rangel got the project started with a highly controversial $1.9 million congressional earmark.

None of this seems to bother to Pelosi, who vowed to implement ethics reform when she took over as speaker with her infamous “maybe it takes a woman to clean house” rhetoric. Through a spokesman, Madam Speaker said the call to oust Rangel is a ploy to divert attention from the continuing fallout of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and its culture of corruption.

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Tell US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow a vote on new FEC commissioners

Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) has launched a new campaign website called Fix the FEC. Since early this year, the Federal Election Commission has been without a quorum of its commissioners (there are only two of the normal six commissioners), rendering many of it's regulatory responsibilities useless.

Fix the FEC is very well-designed and easy to use. First and foremost, it asks the public to send a letter to US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to let the senate vote in new commissioners to return the FEC to quorum. You can send your letter right from the site's homepage. Then, you can send a letter to your family and friends about the campaign from another webpage. Background information about the current FEC crisis, its latest news and an FEC violation tipline are also easily located on Fix the FEC.

I highly recommend you participate with CREW using this great activist campaign website, Fix the FEC.

U.S. Department of Justice fails for 15 years to administer used car database for public

Public Citizen has announced that they and two other consumer groups are sueing the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for failing to administer a database of defective vehicles. The lawsuit asks the court to find the DOJ in violation of a 1992 law for not having established the database or even the regulations setting it up. The suits ask the court to order the DOJ to issue the regulations within 30 days of finding the agency in violation.

Under the 1992 law, junk and salvage yard operators are required to file monthly reports to the database operator. Each report is supposed to contain a list of the vehicle identification numbers of all junk and salvage vehicles obtained during the previous month. The law also requires insurance companies to file similar reports. But the DOJ has yet to establish regulations that would tell insurance companies and junk and salvage yards how to report their information.

Bush regulators break law to avoid mine safety violations

TPMmuckraker from Talking Points Memo has a posted a note about the lack of action by the U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The Bush administration’s federal mine safety regulators have violated federal law by allowing thousands of health and safety violations to go unpunished. In just the past six years, The Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration failed to act upon approximately 4,000 violations. One of those violations was partially responsible for the 2005 death of a Kentucky miner. (Charleston Gazette)