Amid Routine Business, History and Humiliation

All week the issue hung around, nagging for attention like a churlish relative, while the House of Representatives considered measures that would rename post offices, lower the volume level of TV commercials and salute the golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez. By the time the delicate moment finally arrived late Thursday afternoon, the outcome seemed foreordained. And yet the 80-year-old Harlem Democrat under inspection continued to hope things might somehow go a different way. For a fleeting instant, it almost seemed possible.As Representative Charles B. Rangel’s awkward day unspooled, the jammed House floor was buzzing for this once-in-decades happening. The press rows were busy. Traffic, though, was light in the high-up visitors’ gallery, grade school classes here earlier having left too soon to watch history.
He sat among some of his keenest allies, Representative Robert C. Scott from Virginia and three members of the New York delegation, Representatives Joseph Crowley, Jerrold Nadler and Anthony D. Weiner.
Other votes had to be taken — the expiring Bush-era tax cuts were on the agenda — but then 4 o’clock rolled around and it was his time.
In the chamber where laws got made, the 111th Congress conducted its bit of nasty business relatively briskly, finding no benefit in stretching out this mini-morality play any longer than necessary.In the hour allocated for debate, a silent House listened as the ethics committee chairwoman, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, and other committee members made the case for censure, revisiting Mr. Rangel’s bundle of ethical misdeeds: unpaid taxes; improper solicitation of charitable donations; flawed reporting of income — what some of his sturdiest defenders had seen fit to condense further to little more than grabbing the wrong stationery. The normally brassy Mr. Rangel was penitent as he apologized “for putting you in this awkward position today,” before recalling a day in Korea 60 years ago “in sub-zero weather,” when “I was wounded and had no thought that I would be able to survive.”

A string of defenders, from New York, California and Iowa, argued for a reprimand, a written rebuke of his wrongdoings, not the censure that would mean a verbal flogging in front of everyone. There was no mistaking that it all had the feel of the territory of small boys allowed into the world of grown-ups.

In a momentary twist, Representative G. K. Butterfield of North Carolina introduced an amendment to lower the punishment to reprimand. A voice vote was called for. It was ruled in favor of the amendment. A recorded vote was demanded.

No one any longer seemed certain where this was going.

Members of Congress watched the lighted green yeas and red nays blink on the wall scoreboard. There were 15 minutes to vote. With five minutes left, it was 100 yeas and 131 nays. Was it possible censure would not happen this day?
The final minutes went badly for Mr. Rangel. The amendment fell by 267 to 146.
The vote on the censure resolution was an easy call. There was no need to watch the lights. Mr. Rangel studied them for a while, then lingered by his seat, his head bent, no more outs available.
The rest happened fast.
From the dais, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her waning days as presiding officer, summoned “the gentleman from New York” to the well of the House to hear a chastisement unheard in 27 years, not since the July day in 1983 when the House delivered bipartisan shame to a Republican and a Democrat who had had dalliances with 17-year-old pages.
Mr. Rangel stood, feet apart, his arms clasped before him, the vigor washed out of him.Ms. Pelosi solemnly read the one-paragraph admonition properly known as House Resolution 1737. No florid rhetoric was flaunted for this pressing bit of protocol, but the stiff, cut-and-dried language of censure: “Resolved, that, one, Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York be censured,” and so forth.
In their seats in the arched rows, his hushed colleagues stared through tight eyes at the peculiar spectacle. In less than half a minute and with 90 spoken words, it was over.Now one additional line would be edited into the biographical brief of a 20-term warhorse congressman and decorated Korean War veteran: the 23rd member of the House to be so punished.A chastened Mr. Rangel asked for one more minute to speak. He called what had happened to him a “new criteria” and said there was more politics than justice on display. Then he finished by saying, “At the end of the day, compared to where I’ve been, I haven’t had a bad day since.”
There was some scattered applause. As Mr. Rangel headed back up the aisle, a few members of Congress hugged him or touched him on his arm. He walked out the door alone.
Members of Congress got going with their obligatory post-mortems: Make the punishment fit the crime, sad but necessary.Its day not yet done, the machinery of government moved on to other matters.