Mr. Rangel Goes To Washington

Mr. Smith: “Are you drunk?”

Miss Saunders: “Certainly. You didn't think I was a lady, did you? You don't think a lady would be working for this outfit. Even I can't take it anymore. I quit. Can't take a lot of things. You. I can't watch a simple guy like you — Why don't you go back home? Take my advice. Go on back to your prairies — roust your rangers around — tell your little streams about your camp and the land of the free! This isn't any place for you. You're half-way decent. You don't belong here. Go home. That's all I'll tell you. That's all. I owe my conscience that much . . .”

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The hero of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” played by Jimmy Stewart, is a youth leader who was beloved by his young rangers and wanted to build a boys’ camp to get the city kids out into the fresh air. The hero of this saga, Charlie Rangel of Harlem, is a decorated war veteran who is beloved even by many who disagree with him and who wanted to build a center at a college for poor children that would lift them up into public service.

And for this, the Congress, like it did Mr. Smith, is going to put him on trial — and, in Mr. Rangel’s case, later this month.

It may not be a perfect analogy. Hollywood’s fictional Mr. Smith was a young man just starting out, way over his head, or so it seems at first, when the home-town newspapers tried to hang a scandal around his neck. Mr. Rangel is a suave veteran of 40 years in Congress, a master of the game, or so it seems at first, when the home town press barons tried to hang a scandal around his neck. But the congressman is being widely mocked for standing his ground, just as Mr. Smith was in the movie, and the trial that resulted in the movie was something to see. So, we expect, will be the trial of Mr. Rangel.

The chairman of Ways and Means requested a formal investigation after the home town newspaper barons started printing stories about his use of a rent-controlled apartment for a campaign office and his use of congressional letterhead to write to private donors to try to get them to help City College defray costs of a center to help minority students train for public service. It turned out that the chairman of the tax-writing committee had also failed to declare certain rental income to the IRS and certain assets required to be disclosed to the Congress.

My own view of this is that the worst of it amounted to small beer and the combination, several bottles of small beer. There is no allegation that the congressman took any money. In my view, the right thing is to hand Mr. Rangel back the gavel to the Ways and Means Committee and let the people of Harlem, who in any event have more credibility than the Congress, decide what they want to do about the man who has represented them in Washington these past 40 years.

Things have gotten to a point, though, where at least some of us are looking forward to the trial of Mr. Rangel. He may have been mocked for his rambling floor speech, in which he told his colleagues that if they wanted to throw him out of the Congress they should go ahead and do it but that he wanted the chance to defend himself. Even the president of America seemed to have pre-judged Mr. Rangel. One gets the feeling that they’d all be happier if he just went back to New York and, like Miss Saunders said to Mr. Smith, talked to the young rangers at the Rangel Center about freedom.

But Mr. Rangel, like Mr. Smith, wants a hearing, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the press galleries fill up. Whose idea was it to start this center for minority youth? Whose idea was it to name it for Mr. Rangel? So far the president of City College on whose watch this occurred, Gregory Williams, has declined to respond to the press. He is a distinguished figure, now president of the University of Cincinnati, and it was to him that the pledge of money for the Rangel Center was made. It’ll be illuminating to see him on the stand.

What about the just retired district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau? He is one of the most honest and longest-serving prosecutors in history. His grandfather was lifted from poverty and put on the road to public service by City College. After the DA was elected in 2005, he made a point of being sworn in at City College in a ceremony at which his former colleague, Mr. Rangel, presided. It was Mr. Morgenthau who introduced to Messrs. Rangel and Williams the chairman of Nabors Industries, Eugene Isenberg, who eventually, in a meeting with Mr. Williams, pledged $500,000 of his own money — and said he’d try to get his company’s foundation to give another $500,000 — in a charitable gift to City College to help with the Rangel Center.

Neither Messrs. Morgenthau nor Rangel were at that meeting, which took place in 2006. Yet the New York Times has come in on the eve of the trial with a story suggesting that Mr. Morgenthau’s motives were not, as he has always averred, charitable, because he owned stock in Nabors Industries, which several years later turned out to have an interest in legislation before Ways and Means. Yet Mr. Morgenthau had been publicly disclosing his stock holdings in Nabors, exactly as required. It seems that because the New York Times hadn’t reported them before, the disclosures became suspicious.

Well, someone has to play the heavy-handed press baron who was so central to “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.” If it gets to a “trial,” maybe the House Ethics Committee will subpoena the Gray Lady herself and ask her this question: Does the New York Times, or does it not, believe that Mr. Morgenthau’s motives in this matter were something other than charitable?

And who, finally, is going to play the part of Senator Paine? He’s the politician who, in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington,” turns against the young idealist and becomes his accuser before the Congress — until he can no longer stand his own hypocrisy and lunges off the senate floor and into the cloakroom, where he tries to shoot himself, only to careen back onto the floor, raving about how he doesn’t deserve to be in the Congress at all?

Well, it’s anyone’s guess how this trial is going to end. In the movie, Mr. Smith and his Girl Friday, Saunders, look set to get married and, presumably, live happily ever after. Congress isn’t Hollywood, of course, and it’s probably a faint hope, but it would be good to see the Charles Rangel Center for Public Service grow and prosper at City College and Mr. Rangel and his wife of forty years, Alma, live happily ever after themselves.

Mr. Lipsky is the editor of The New York Sun.