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      Charles B. Rangel: A Life in Pictures

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      Charles B. Rangel died Monday at age 94, leaving behind a larger-than-life legacy in Harlem, his birthplace and longtime home, which he represented in Congress for more than four decades.To veterans, friends and Harlem residents who gathered on Monday for a Memorial Day lunch at American Legion Post 398, a few blocks from his home, he was just Charlie: a onetime member of the Legion post, a political powerhouse who always made himself accessible to his constituents.Nadine Pittman, a longtime American Legion Auxiliary member and a lifelong Harlem resident, described Mr. Rangel as “down-to-earth with the people.”“He’d take the time and talk to you,” Ms. Pittman said. “I loved him as a person.”Mr. Rangel retired as the ninth-longest continuously serving member of the House of Representatives in U.S. history. He was part of a quartet of venerable Harlem politicians known as the Gang of Four.Mr. Rangel was born and raised in Harlem and attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx until he dropped out to join the Army in 1948. He fought in the Korean War and was awarded a Bronze Star for valor after leading his all-Black unit to safety.Mr. Rangel was elected in 1966 to the State Assembly. In 1970, he was voted into Congress, unseating Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a longtime incumbent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charles Rangel, former Harlem congressman, dies aged 94

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      Former US congressman Charles Rangel of New York, an outspoken, gravel-voiced Harlem Democrat who spent nearly five decades on Capitol Hill and was a founding member of the Congressional Black caucus, died on Monday at the age of 94.His family confirmed the death in a statement provided by City College of New York spokesperson Michelle Stent. He died at a hospital in New York, Stent said.A veteran of the Korean war, Rangel defeated legendary Harlem politician Adam Clayton Powell in 1970 to start his congressional career. During the next 40-plus years, he became a legend himself – dean of the New York congressional delegation, and, in 2007, the first African American to chair the powerful House ways and means committee.He stepped down from that committee amid an ethics cloud, and the House censured him in 2010 after a House ethics committee conducted a hearing on 13 counts of alleged financial and fundraising misconduct over issues surrounding financial disclosures and use of congressional resources. He was convicted by Congress of 11 violations, but he continued to serve in the House until his retirement in 2017.Rangel was the last surviving member of the Gang of Four, Black political figures who wielded great power in New York City and state politics. The others were David Dinkins, New York City’s first Black mayor; Percy Sutton, who was Manhattan borough president; and Basil Paterson, a deputy mayor and secretary of state of New York.Rangel’s distinctive gravelly voice and wry sense of humor made him a memorable character not just in politics but in the rest of his life and environs.The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, paid tribute on X, calling Rangel a “great man, a great friend, and someone who never stopped fighting for his constituents and the best of America”.“The list of his accomplishments could take pages, but he leaves the world a much better place than he found it,” Schumer posted.The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, also praised Rangel.“Charlie Rangel was a phenomenal patriot, hero, statesman, leader, trailblazer, change agent and champion for justice,” he posted on X.Jeffries, a fellow New Yorker, called Rangel “the Lion of Lenox Ave”, an iconic street at the heart of Harlem, and said he was a transformational force of nature.“Harlem, NYC & America are better today because of his service. May he forever rest in power,” Jeffries posted.Rangel was known for fiercely looking out for his constituents, sponsoring empowerment zones with tax credits for businesses moving into economically depressed areas and developers of low-income housing.“I have always been committed to fighting for the little guy,” Rangel said in 2012.He was known as one of the most liberal representatives in the House, loudest in opposition to the Iraq war, which he branded a “death tax” on poor people and minorities. In 2004, he tried to end the war by offering a bill to restart the military service draft. Republicans called his bluff and brought the bill to a vote. Even Rangel voted against it.A year later, Rangel’s fight over the war became bitterly personal with the then US vice-president, Dick Cheney, Republican president George W Bush’s running mate and a prime defense hawk.Rangel said Cheney, who has a history of heart trouble, might be too sick to perform his job.“I would like to believe he’s sick rather than just mean and evil,” Rangel said. After several such verbal jabs, Cheney hit back, saying Rangel was “losing it”.The Harlem lawmaker first entered the House in 1971. In 1987, Congress approved what was known as the “Rangel amendment”, which denied foreign tax credits to US companies investing in apartheid-era South Africa, where the wealthy ruling white minority held power by heavily oppressing the Black majority.Rangel was born on 11 June 1930. During the Korean war, he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.A high school dropout, he went to college on the GI Bill, getting degrees from New York University and St John’s University School of Law.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Top Republicans threaten to block Trump’s spending bill if national debt is not reduced

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      Donald Trump has been warned by fiscal hawks within his own party in the US Senate that he must “get serious” about cutting government spending and reducing the national debt or else they will block the passage of his signature tax-cutting legislation known as the “big, beautiful bill”.Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who rose to prominence as a fiscal hardliner with the Tea Party movement, issued the warning to the president on Sunday. Asked by CNN’s State of the Union whether his faction had the numbers to halt the bill, he replied: “I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.”Trump has invested a large portion of his political capital in the massive package. It extends the 2017 tax cuts from his first administration in return for about $1tn in benefits cuts including reductions in the health insurance scheme for low-income families, Medicaid, and to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) food stamps.The bill squeaked through US House by just one vote on Thursday. It now faces a perilous welcome in the upper legislative chamber.Sunday’s admonitions from prominent senators angered by the failure to address the budget deficit bodes ill for Trump’s agenda given the tightness of the Republicans’ congressional majorities. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, can afford to lose only three votes from among his party’s 53.Thune has indicated that changes to the bill might be needed to bring refuseniks on side. That in turn could present the House speaker, Mike Johnson, with a headache.The House will have to approve any changes made in the Senate under the process of budget reconciliation, which allows spending packages to be fast-tracked through Congress avoiding a Senate filibuster of 60 votes. The final contents of the bill will need to be blessed by both chambers, with Democrats almost certain to vote unanimously in opposition.The House speaker renewed his plea to his Senate colleagues on Sunday to go lightly with him. He encouraged them on CBS News’s Face the Nation “to make as few modifications as possible, remembering that I have a very delicate balance on our very diverse Republican caucus over in the House”.But Senate budget hawks do not appear to be in the mood for compromise. Ron Johnson estimated that the bill would add up to $4tn to the federal deficit, a calculation that is broadly in line with the latest analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).Johnson added a rare note of personal criticism of Trump from a congressional Republican. He said that while Trump might not be worried about the national debt, “I’m extremely worried about that.”He added: “We are mortgaging our children’s future. It’s wrong. It’s immoral. It has to stop.”Another key Tea Party senator, Rand Paul from Kentucky, has also been vocal over the deficit. He laid into the spending cuts contained in the big beautiful bill, telling Fox News Sunday that in his view they were “wimpy and anemic” and would “explode the debt”.Other influential Republican senators have been expressing concern about the number of Americans who would lose access to health coverage as a result of the legislation’s cuts to Medicaid. According to the CBO, almost 8 million people would be thrown off the benefit.Speaker Johnson tried to dismiss the concern, telling CBS News that 1.4 million of those vulnerable people were “illegal aliens receiving benefits” – and a further 4.8 million were able-bodied individuals choosing not to work and “gaming the system”.An analysis by the non-partisan FactCheck.org found that the claim that 1.4 million undocumented migrants were on Medicaid was false. People living in the US without immigration papers are not eligible for the federal program other than to receive emergency medical treatment.More than 1 million undocumented immigrants are in danger of losing health benefits as a result of Trump’s cuts – but this assistance is provided by states and has nothing to do with Medicaid.Any reduction in Medicaid would be politically awkward for Trump, who promised repeatedly on the campaign trail last year that he would not touch basic safety nets such as Medicaid, Medicare and social security. The president’s loyal supporters in the Maga (“Make America great again”) movement have cautioned against the move.Steve Bannon, who served as chief White House strategist in Trump’s first administration and remains a persuasive voice within the movement, recently told listeners to his War Room podcast: “You got to be careful, because a lot of Maga is on Medicaid.”Josh Hawley, the Republican US senator from Missouri, recently said that “slashing health insurance for the working poor” would be “politically suicidal”. More

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      How the Ravages of Age Are Ravaging the Democratic Party

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      Now is the time for the Democratic Party to get serious about its oldsters problem.The furor over President Joe Biden’s cognitive issues is not going away any time soon. On Tuesday it bubbled up in the California governor’s race, when one candidate, Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles, accused two other Democrats eyeing the governor’s mansion — former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra — of participating in a “cover-up” of Mr. Biden’s fading fitness in office.“Voters deserve to know the truth. What did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” Mr. Villaraigosa fumed in a statement, spurred by tidbits from the new book “Original Sin,” which chronicles the efforts of Mr. Biden’s inner circle to conceal his mental and physical decline. Mr. Villaraigosa called on Ms. Harris and Mr. Becerra to “apologize to the American people.”Is Mr. Villaraigosa, who is 72 himself, exploiting the orgy of Biden recriminations for political ends? Probably. Does he have a point? Absolutely. Team Biden deserves much abuse for its sins. That said, last week also reminded us that the Democrats’ flirtation with gerontocracy is not confined to a single office or branch of government when, on Wednesday, the House was shaken by the death of Representative Gerry Connolly.Mr. Connolly, a 75-year-old lawmaker from Northern Virginia, had been in poor health. On Nov. 7 last year, two days after his re-election to a ninth term, he announced he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and would undergo treatments. Even so, in December he won a high-profile contest against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. The race was seen as a struggle over the future of the seniority system that has long shaped how Democrats pick committee leaders. Despite concerns about his health, seniority carried the day. On April 28, he announced that his cancer had returned and that he would not seek re-election next year. Less than a month later, he was gone.Washington being Washington, his death was greeted with sadness but also with chatter about the political repercussions in the narrowly divided House. It was not lost on Beltway pundits that if Democrats had had one more “no” vote in their deliberations over President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” Republicans would have had to sway another of their holdouts to ram it through the House last week.Mr. Connolly was the third House Democrat to die in recent months, after the deaths in March of Raúl Grijalva and Sylvester Turner, both septuagenarians. All three seats are vacant for now. Axios pointed out that eight members of Congress have died in office since November 2022. All were Democrats, with an average age of 75.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Frank Moore, a Top Aide to Jimmy Carter, Is Dead at 89

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      After serving as chief of staff when Carter was governor of Georgia, he followed him to Washington, where both men encountered a hostile political establishment.Frank Moore, who as President Jimmy Carter’s congressional liaison toiled with mixed results to sell the agenda of a self-professed outsider to veterans of Washington, died on Thursday at his home in St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 89.His son Brian confirmed the death.Mr. Carter was known for having a “Georgia Mafia” around him during his presidency. Mr. Moore was a leading member of that group, and the two men remained close until Mr. Carter’s death. According to the Georgia newspaper The Gainesville Times, Mr. Moore was the last living person to have worked for Mr. Carter for the entirety of his political career: as an aide from his days as a Georgia state senator all the way through his presidency.In Washington, the two men had what might have seemed like an ideal chance for legislative achievements. For all four years of the Carter administration, the Democrats controlled every branch of government, and from January 1977 to January 1979 they had supermajorities in the House and the Senate.Yet it was a less ideologically homogenous era for the party. The Democratic caucus in the Senate, for example, encompassed liberals like Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, staunch anti-Communists like Henry Jackson of Washington and conservative segregationists like John C. Stennis of Mississippi.These separate factions and their wily tacticians were relatively unfamiliar to Mr. Carter and Mr. Moore, who had first met far away from the nation’s capital — on a local planning panel in Georgia in the mid-1960s.In the 1970s, after Mr. Carter had been elected governor, he made Mr. Moore his chief of staff. During Mr. Carter’s presidential run, Mr. Moore, a soft-voiced 40-year-old who held the title of national finance chairman, was one of a few of Mr. Carter’s Georgia allies to set up his campaign office in Washington.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Millions Could Lose Food Stamp Benefits Under Trump Tax Bill, Analysis Finds

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      Others could see their monthly benefits reduced if the bill were to become law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.Millions of low-income Americans could lose access to food stamps or see reductions in their monthly benefits as a result of House Republicans’ newly adopted tax bill, according to an analysis released Thursday from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.The findings underscore the significant trade-offs in the party’s signature legislative package, which seeks to save money by cutting federal anti-poverty programs in a move that may leave some of the poorest Americans in worse financial shape.To save nearly $300 billion over the next decade, Republicans proposed a series of new rules that would tighten eligibility under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Under their bill, a wider range of aid recipients would be required to obtain work to qualify for federal help.Republicans say the change aims to reduce waste and ensure that the federal government provides food stamps only to the truly needy. They have similarly looked to expand work requirements to Medicaid, which provides health insurance to low-income Americans.Still, the work mandate could reduce participation in SNAP by more than three million people in an average month over the next decade, according to the budget office, which studied a version of the party’s recently approved legislative package.Republicans also proposed to have states assume some of the costs for the federal food stamp program, an idea that has troubled some governors, who say their budgets cannot afford to shoulder the responsibility.As a result, congressional budget scorekeepers estimated the shift could result in an average of 1.3 million people losing access to SNAP. They attributed the reduction to the fact that some states may opt to “modify benefits or eligibility or possibly leave the program altogether because of the increased costs.”Issuing its analysis, the budget office cautioned it could not produce one total, concise estimate of the number of people who could lose anti-hunger aid, given the possibility of overlap and the potential interactions with changes to other federal programs.Still, the budget office estimated that many of Republicans’ proposed changes would reduce eligibility while cutting benefit amounts for those who do remain on the program. A small percentage of households could even see a roughly $100 reduction in their monthly allowance because of a provision that would change how some benefits are computed, according to the analysis. More

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      ‘Pro-worker priorities’? Trump’s budget offers the exact opposite | Steven Greenhouse

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      With Donald Trump pushing hard to give big tax cuts to the rich and do huge favors for crypto billionaires, it was jarring to see a photo of a Trump aide carrying a sign that said: “President Trump’s Pro-Worker Priorities”. The aide was about to place the sign on Trump’s lectern; it mentioned such “pro-worker priorities” as ending federal taxes on tips and overtime pay: catchy, but scattershot policies that will help only a fraction of the nation’s workers.Not surprisingly, that sign made no mention of Trump’s many anti-worker policies that will do serious harm to millions of workers and their families. Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which is advancing in the House, includes the biggest cuts ever to Medicaid, a nearly 30% reduction in food assistance, and a $350bn cut in aid that helps working-class kids afford college. Trump has also pushed to end home-heating assistance and to make it harder for millions of Americans to afford Obamacare. If that isn’t painful enough, GOP deficit hawks have vowed to torpedo the budget bill unless it includes even more cuts. Under the current Trump House bill, at least 13.7 million people would lose health coverage – and the deficit hawks’ demands would increase that number.Even some prominent Republicans acknowledge that the Republican bill contains policies that will screw workers. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, slammed the Trump-GOP push to chop hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid. “These are working people and their children who need healthcare, and it’s just wrong to go and cut their healthcare when they’re trying to make ends meet, trying to help their kids,” Hawley said. He added: “No Republican should be supporting Medicaid benefit cuts.”To give a truer picture of what Trump is all about, that Trump aide should have also been carrying a sign that said: “President Trump’s Pro-Billionaire Priorities”. Those priorities are more ambitious and will cost far more than Trump’s “pro-worker priorities” – they include over a trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy, stratagems to help crypto billionaires grow ever richer, and big cuts to the IRS budget to reduce the chances that the ultra-wealthy will get audited. To please his billionaire finance buddies, Trump has sought to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created to protect typical families from financial scams and extortionate banking practices. And let’s not forget the many ways Trump is helping to steer more business to Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and Trump’s biggest campaign contributor (to the tune of $270m backing the president and other Republicans).The Center for American Progress points out that the Trump/Republican budget bill would, if implemented, “be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in US history”. Another progressive thinktank, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, notes that the budget bill would cut $1.1tn from food aid, Medicaid and other health programs while lavishing $1.1tn in tax cuts upon those earning over $500,000. Not only that, the 1m households earning over $1m a year would receive $105bn in tax cuts in 2027 – that’s more than the tax cuts going to the 127m households earning under $100,000.Republicans defend their painful program cuts as healthy, saying they will hold down the budget deficit. But there is of course a far less painful and more worker-friendly way to reduce the budget deficit: don’t extend the trillions in Trump tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor the rich.When Trump boasts about the “big, beautiful” bill, he talks only about the tax cuts, but never about how the cuts in Medicaid and Snap (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) will hurt millions of families. The Republican party consistently fails to note that one in four small-business owners and one in four veterans live in households that receive help from Snap, Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Under the planned cuts to Snap, 42 million people – including one in five children in the US – could see their food assistance reduced.According to the Penn Wharton Budget model, when one factors in the Medicaid and Snap cuts along with the tax cuts, the Trump-House bill would cause Americans earning less than $17,000 a year to lose $1,030 on average in after-tax income starting in 2026. Households earning between $17,000 and $51,000 a year would lose around $700 on average. The very wealthy do far better. For those in the richest 0.1% – that is, households earning at least $4.3m a year – their after-tax income would jump by over $388,000.That doesn’t sound very pro-worker to me. It’s a perversion of the truth for Trump to boast of his pro-worker bona fides when he steadfastly refuses to push for the two things that would do most to lift workers’ living standards: push to raise workers’ pay and push to strengthen labor unions and worker bargaining power. Not only has Trump done nothing to increase the paltry $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, but he killed a Biden-era regulation that required federal contractors to pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour. Now many of those workers will see their pay sink to $13.30 an hour. What’s more, Trump has sought to sabotage unions, not strengthen them. He has moved to strip 1 million federal employees of their right to bargain while also seeking to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, which protects workers’ ability to bargain for better pay and conditions.As for Trump’s call to end the tax on tips, that will help many restaurant servers and hotel housekeepers, but the Yale Budget Lab says that provision has a narrow scope and will help less than 3% of all workers.Last year, candidate Trump said: “As soon as I get to office, we will make housing much more affordable.” But second-term Trump is doing just the opposite. His budget calls for a devastating 40% cut in rental assistance that millions of Americans rely on to pay their monthly rent. Candidate Trump also said: “Your heating and air conditioning, electricity, gasoline – all can be cut down in half.” But for millions of Americans he is increasing that burden by pushing to end a program that helps six million struggling households afford to heat and cool their homes.Many blue-collar Americans are eager to send their kids to college, but Trump and House Republicans would make that harder. Around one in eight Americans have federal student loans, which have been key to enabling millions of people to afford college. But Republicans want to eliminate subsidized loans for undergraduates and increase the minimum monthly payments that low-income borrowers already have a hard time paying.Trump boasts he is pro-worker, but he is doing absolutely nothing to help with what many workers say are their biggest priorities: making housing more affordable, reducing the cost of childcare and healthcare, making it easier to send one’s kids to college, and bringing down prices. Billionaires can rejoice that Trump is capitulating to them and their priorities, but American workers shouldn’t be fooled into believing that Trump is addressing their needs.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Sleep-Deprived Lawmakers Stay Up All Night to Pass the ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill

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      Some napped, others pulled all-nighters, and most were bleary-eyed as they slogged to the end of a marathon House debate over President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation.As they arrived at the Capitol not long after dawn on Thursday to vote on a sweeping domestic policy bill to deliver President Trump’s agenda, members of the House of Representatives were divided by more than just partisan lines.The far more visible split was among those who had managed to get some sleep and those who hadn’t.“Here come the troops,” Representative Glenn Thompson, Republican of Pennsylvania, said cheerfully as he welcomed a bleary-eyed procession of lawmakers to the marble corridors just after 6 a.m.“Clock in on your left,” he added with a smile, gesturing toward the House chamber, where members would soon cast their votes on the wide-ranging bill overhauling key government programs.Many arrived clutching coffee cups or cans of energy drinks, struggling to stay alert after a week’s worth of all-night committee sessions capped off by an overnight floor debate that unfolded as House Republican leaders raced to deliver Mr. Trump a major victory on what he calls the “big, beautiful bill” before a self-imposed Memorial Day deadline.As party leaders delivered their final remarks, some lawmakers stood at attention, clapping and cheering the concluding arguments for and against the bill. Others slumped in peripheral seats or disappeared into the far corners of the chamber, barely awake and struggling to stay that way until the final vote.In a room near the floor, Republican leaders had laid out provisions — not the legislative kind — that would have to suffice for breakfast: dozens of boxes of pizza and a polished silver bowl of fruit snacks, pretzels and chips.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More