{"id":383814,"date":"2010-03-03T10:21:10","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T15:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=78182"},"modified":"2010-03-03T10:21:10","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T15:21:10","slug":"the-political-calculus-of-rangel-stepping-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/383814","title":{"rendered":"The Political Calculus of Rangel Stepping Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, points out that Rep. Charlie Rangel&#8217;s (D-N.Y.) decision to step down from his perch atop the Ways and Means Committee &#8220;didn\u2019t happen in a vacuum.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Midterm elections are only eight months away and voters have made it abundantly clear that they care about ethics, even if members of Congress only pretend to,&#8221; Sloan said in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citizensforethics.org\/node\/44315\" >a statement<\/a>. &#8220;By forcing Rep. Rangel out, Democrats undercut Republican efforts to portray them as soft on ethics, the very strategy that returned Democrats to the majority in the 2006 elections.\u201d<span id=\"more-78182\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Rangel <a href=\"http:\/\/ethics.house.gov\/Media\/PDF\/Press_Statement_Carib_News.pdf\" >was admonished<\/a> last week by the House Ethics Committee for taking corporate-sponsored trips that the same ethics panel had approved beforehand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, points out that Rep. Charlie Rangel&#8217;s (D-N.Y.) decision to step down from his perch atop the Ways and Means Committee &#8220;didn\u2019t happen in a vacuum.&#8221; &#8220;Midterm elections are only eight months away and voters have made it abundantly clear [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4315,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-383814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4315"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}