Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- It is with great regret that I write that Democrats must remove Charlie Rangel from his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Almost everyone likes Rangel, which is why he’s survived a raft of allegations of financial impropriety that would make a Wall Street banker blush.

The New York congressman, cited again as one of the most corrupt members of Congress by the respected nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, beat back a resolution Wednesday introduced by a Texas Republican to strip him of his chairmanship. The claim: the country’s chief tax writer shouldn’t be cheating on his taxes. Rangel’s office called it a “highly partisan effort.” Democrats closed ranks. It failed.

This story has a familiar ring to it. When Republicans controlled Congress, they ignored corruption in their own ranks. Members resigned in disgrace, lost races, or went to prison in the Jack Abramoff scandal, but not because the leadership called them to account.

The House ethics committee looked at former Representative Mark Foley’s explicit messages to underage pages and found that no one behaved “inappropriately.” The same committee was unmoved by Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who was living on a yacht, within sight of the Capitol, subsidized by defense contractors who also bought his house at an inflated price.

Republican colleagues mostly swept aside former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s faults. He decided not to run for re-election after he was indicted in Texas on money-laundering charges, allegations he has sought unsuccessfully to have dismissed.

Democratic Ownership

Democrats now own the Congress, an institution held in lower regard than used-car salesmen. They’re doing no better at sanctioning their members, in spite of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pledge to “drain the swamp.” Venerable political prognosticator Charlie Cook predicts that Democrats will lose seats “if she’s only drained the red swamp and not the blue one.”

Pelosi tried to give Representative William Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, a coveted seat on the Homeland Security Committee despite photos of $90,000 in cash tucked inside containers of Pillsbury Pie Crust and Boca Burger from an FBI raid of Jefferson’s house. He would later be convicted of 11 counts of racketeering and bribery.

Pelosi’s friend, Representative John Murtha, has been ethically challenged since being implicated in Abscam in the late 1970s. He now faces probes for matters including no-bid contracts awarded to a nephew’s company and $38.1 million in earmarked appropriations for clients of the PMA Group, which employ former Murtha staff members and contributed to his campaign. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, has called attempts to strengthen congressional standards “crap.”

List of Lapses

Rangel’s lapses include allegations of evading taxes on $1.3 million in income derived from multiple properties and failing to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars of assets and income. He also faces accusations of taking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center at City College from a wealthy businessman who later got a lucrative tax break for his company.

He also took a Citigroup-funded trip to the Caribbean in November 2008, when the bank was bellying up to the federal bailout trough.

Rangel asked the House ethics committee to probe some of the allegations in September 2008, including whether his use of a rent-controlled apartment in a luxury building constituted an illegal campaign contribution from the landlord. The committee also is looking at rental income from a vacation villa in the Dominican Republic that Rangel failed to acknowledge when filling out financial disclosure forms.

Ethics Die

Don’t think Rangel is a masochist. He’s given campaign donations from his massive war chest to three of the five Democrats on the committee. Heading the probe is Representative G.K. Butterfield, who went on the trip with Rangel to the Caribbean. The ethics committee, says CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloane, is “where ethics complaints go to die.”

There is life after death-by-scandal. Last month, Foley began hosting a talk show called “Inside the Mind of Mark Foley,” a place where station WSVU in Florida must think listeners want to go.

And while awaiting trial, DeLay appeared on “Dancing with the Stars” for three weeks. Last week’s cha-cha to “Wild Thing” failed to win many votes, and he quit this past Tuesday complaining that his high-heeled samba shoes pinched his toes.

It’s hard to cede power. One day you are at the top of the heap, the next, a nobody with massive legal bills and sore feet on a reality TV show. At 79, Rangel could go quietly into that good night of retirement. Spending more time with the family that never commanded much of it is a cliché, but no one would fault him for using it.

To the question of mountains or beach, Rangel could choose the latter, as he rediscovers the oceanside resort in the Dominican Republic he forgot he had.

(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 8, 2009 21:00 EDT