Catastrophe - Dick Morris [72]
But despite his charisma, commitment, and success, Powell lost the support of his colleagues and his constituents after accusations about misuse of government funds and long, unexplained absences from Congress. After he lost a libel lawsuit in New York, he was found in contempt and spent most of his time in Florida and Bimini in an effort to evade a subpoena. Eventually, he was expelled from the House during its investigation of him—a much more serious fate than the one suffered by Senator Dodd in the same year. Although Powell was reinstated almost two years later, his loss to Rangel a few months later spelled the end of his political career.
But Rangel, like Dodd, seems not to have internalized either the moral or political dangers of public corruption. He now stands accused of using his position as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee to solicit money from corporations (including AIG) to fund the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York; of failing to report $75,000 in rental income from his vacation villa in the Dominican Republic; of living in four rent-stabilized apartments in New York City in violation of the rent stabilization laws and at below-market rates; of failing to disclose the sale of a home in D.C.; of committing discrepancies in reporting the value of property he owns in Florida; of improperly using the House garage to store his old Mercedes-Benz; and of paying his son more than $80,000 in campaign funds to design a web site that has been ridiculed for its ridiculous design and independently valued as worth about $100.
It is a sad story: Today, these two reformers, these two idealists, are both subjects of Ethics Committee investigations.
They have one more thing in common: both are favorites of the American International Group. AIG, of course, has a great interest in the work of Rangel’s House committee, which writes tax legislation, and in Dodd’s Senate committee, which controls banking and insurance legislation. Now, with AIG as the international symbol of everything that’s wrong with corporate America, their cozy relationships with that corporate pariah are contributing to their own deserved demise.
CHRIS DODD AND “OPM”—OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY
From the time he entered Congress, Chris Dodd quietly depended on other people’s money to pay for his houses and some of his living expenses. It doesn’t seem to have troubled him that most adults actually pay for their own homes with their own money. That’s the way we do it in America. We don’t ask others to contribute to improving our standard of living. We don’t look around and wonder who would be the best person to make our down payment. But that notion was apparently completely foreign to Dodd. Nor did it seem to cross his mind that there was something wrong with the specter of a member of Congress, a senator, asking for handouts from people who potentially had interests before Congress that could affect their livelihood. He wanted a nice place to live—apparently nicer than he felt he could afford on his own—and somehow, miraculously, others stepped forward to donate to that most worthy cause.
Time after time, Dodd’s patrons were willing to fork over substantial amounts of money to purchase and maintain various houses for him. His first housing benefactor was a Washington, D.C., club owner named Sanford Bomstein, who was a longtime personal banker and fund raiser for Dodd’s father. Later he turned to Edward R. Downe, Jr., a charming and generous New York