Winning control of the both Houses of congress is a lot more than getting the better offices. It's about controlling the agenda, which bills get introduced and which bills get to the floor for voting. It's also about being able to conduct Congressional investigations and stopping egregious Supreme and Federal Court nominations. But the office thing can be cool.

Rangel's itching to evict Cheney

Harlem's newly powerful Rep. Charles Rangel wants to stick it to his White House nemesis Vice President Cheney - by taking over his spacious House office. At the same time, the veteran congressman offered a limp olive branch to the vice president yesterday, saying he regretted publicly calling him an SOB last week. "I take back saying that publicly. I should have reserved that for him when we were together privately," said Rangel. "Believe me, he would have understood." Rangel (D-Harlem), poised to become the next chairman of the important House Ways and Means Committee, spoke of the need for bipartisanship with the Republicans, even as he continued his feud with Cheney. "Mr. Cheney enjoys an office on the second floor on the House of Representatives that historically has been designated as the Ways and Means chairman," Rangel mused. "And, I've talked with [future Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi ... and I'm trying to find some way to be gentle as I restore the dignity of that office to the chair." The White House declined to comment.

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This is a good article on Rangel but it's a New York Times regional edition and they don't provide a permalink so it might go away soon.

The Man of the Hour and Chairman-to-Be

Representative Charles B. Rangel’s Town Car was doing the late-afternoon creep down Fifth Avenue yesterday, ferrying him from a conference call in his Harlem office (87 political reporters on the line at once) to a live television appearance at the Fox News studios in Midtown, when he glanced at his phone list. These were the calls congratulating him on his impending ascension, with the previous night’s Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives, to chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. These were calls he had to return, more than 100 since 9 a.m. But there was one particular well-wisher he was eager to get on the line: Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. “Mr. Secretary, I been using your name all over the press saying I’m looking forward to sitting down with you,” Mr. Rangel said into his cellphone. “Finding out what your priorities are and how we can work together.” There was a silence while Mr. Paulson got in a few words. Mr. Rangel thanked him and hung up. Then he launched into his best imitation of a buttoned-up treasury secretary by way of Wall Street. “ ‘We had a bad night last night, but I couldn’t think of anybody I’d rather have as chairman of Ways and Means than you,’ ” Mr. Rangel said. Then, in his own voice, he added, “He already told me that before.” Mr. Rangel, 76, has been waiting for this moment a long time. In 1970, he defeated the long-serving Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and went to Washington to represent Harlem. Four years later, he got a seat on Ways and Means, which writes tax policy and oversees some of the federal government’s largest entitlement programs. It was not an easy appointment to get, he recalled.

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The President's designs on the lame duck Congressional session

When we last left the Republican Senate, in the week before they adjourned, they were so busy legalizing torture and indefinite detentions that they ran out of time to also give the President the power to eavesdrop on Americans in secret. The House had hastily passed Heather Wilson's version of the "Terrorist Surveillance Act," but the Senate had no time to vote on it prior to adjournment. As a result, warrantless eavesdropping continues to be criminal in this country (even though the President continues to engage in it). For that reason, enactment of a warrantless eavesdropping bill remains a top priority for the President -- probably even more important to him now than even before the election -- because such a bill would not only gives him legal authority to eavesdrop with no judicial oversight, but it also would help protect himself against the legal consequences of having repeatedly broken the law. It is worth remembering that a federal court has already ruled his eavesdropping program to be both unconstitutional and in violation of the criminal law, and another judge, the highly respected District Court Judge Gerard Lynch of the Southern District of New York, is likely to issue a ruling soon on the same issues in the absence of Congressional legislation legalizing the program. It seems highly unlikely that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi will have as one of their priorities the enactment of a bill to legalize Bush's eavesdropping program. For the new 110th Congress, a long-overdue investigation of warrantless eavesdropping seems far more likely than legalization of it, to put it mildly. For that reason, the President made clear in a Rose Garden speech today that he wants Congressional action taken on that bill during the lame duck session, to convene before Democrats take over in January:

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Let the games begin.