Rep. Barney Frank (D)

Last updated: November 28, 2011

The congressman from the 4th District is Barney Frank, an influential Democrat elected to the House in 1980. He was chairman of the Financial Services Committee from 2007 until the Democrats lost their House majority in 2011. He is a savvy legislator known for his keen intelligence and sharp tongue. In November 2011, Frank was set to announce he would not seek re-election and retire from Congress at the end of this term.

Frank grew up in Bayonne, N.J. His father ran a truck stop on the New Jersey Turnpike and loved to talk politics. All four of his children went on to careers in government service and politics. Barney distinguished himself as a student and was accepted at Harvard, where he got to know local politicians as well as political scientists. In 1967, he took a job as an aide to newly elected Boston Mayor Kevin White, and four years later, he arrived in Washington as an aide to Democratic Rep. Michael Harrington of Massachusetts. In 1972, Frank was elected to the Massachusetts House from Boston’s Back Bay, which was transitioning from a staid Republican bastion to a liberal singles neighborhood. In 1980, when Democratic Rep. Robert Drinan retired after Pope John Paul II commanded Jesuits to leave elective office, Frank moved to Brookline and ran in the 4th District. With a strong base in Brookline and Newton, he won. After redistricting threw him in with Republican Rep. Margaret Heckler in 1982, he defeated her 60%-40%. He has been re-elected by wide margins since.

In the House, Frank quickly gained a reputation for his smarts and debating skills. He has a distinct, rapid-fire style that leaves opponents tongue-tied. David Shribman, the former longtime Washington Bureau chief of the Boston Globe, once called Frank “cranky, impatient, rude —and utterly brilliant.” In Washingtonian magazine’s annual poll of congressional staffers, he is frequently voted “brainiest.” He is admired even by Republicans for his intellectual rigor and honesty. At the same time, he is a wily political operator. He does not profess to be a political theoretician, though few in the House exceed him as such. Frank once said, “My job is to be the mediator between people who have policy ideas and public policy. My strength is to be able to understand policy ideas and decide how best to implement them. I am about the political process. I know the rules of the House as much as anybody. I am a wonk about how to get things done, more than about what to do.” In his early years in the House, he often worked behind the scenes on substantive issues. After Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, Frank started spending much more time on the floor, pouncing on the new majority’s mistakes, criticizing its policies, and taking it to task when he felt its treatment of the minority was unfair.

Much of his focus in recent years has been on issues involving the House Financial Services Committee. He became the panel’s ranking minority member in 2003 and its chairman in 2007, after Democrats won a House majority. The committee has not been as partisan as many in Congress, and Frank has frequently cooperated with Republicans, including the current chairman, Spencer Bachus, R-Ala. He mastered the complex subjects covered by the committee: securities, corporate governance, accounting issues, and insurance. The regulatory matters that come before the committee are heavily lobbied, the negative effects of bad decisions can be long-lasting, and many issues do not break down along party lines.

Unlike previous Democrats who have chaired this committee—notably Wright Patman of Texas in the 1960s and 1970s—Frank believes in the efficiency and productivity of markets. “I think people may misunderstand what being a liberal means. I really do believe in the free market. You need inequality in the capitalist system, but we are at a point now where we are getting more inequality than is necessary for efficiency or socially helpful. The role of government should put some limits on that inequality, through raising the minimum wage, encouraging unions, providing public-sector programs that help people go to college,” he says. Frank says there is a need for a “grand bargain” between business and liberals. Such pro-growth policies as free-trade agreements and tax cuts, in his view, have tended to widen economic inequality. His grand bargain would have Republicans accept a hike in the minimum wage, a tax increase on high-income earners, and union certification based on the signatures of a majority of workers rather than a secret-ballot election. It would have Democrats accept free-trade agreements with labor and environmental measures that meet “minimal standards of civility,” while accepting foreign direct investment in the United States without restriction. “I want to get the people who have been concerned about equity to support growth policies and the people who have been chafing that we aren’t doing enough for growth to support policies that provide equity,” Frank says. He can claim that he has been carrying out his side of the bargain: He has supported many free-trade agreements and has trenchantly criticized farm subsidies backed by most Democrats. He argues that “employer-paid health care is a mistake” that “depresses wages”—a point that former President George W. Bush was fond of making.

In the majority, Frank initially focused on the credit crunch for housing, and then moved on to even more difficult challenges in the real estate and banking industries and in the overall economy. As the nation headed toward recession in September 2007, he won House approval of a bill designed to expand homeownership by easing loan rates to borrowers who were suffering from the meltdown in the subprime mortgage market. The next month, Frank won passage, with Republican support, of a bill to create an affordable-housing trust fund for low-income families, with the goal of producing 1.5 million housing units in the next decade. After the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008, Frank moved a bill requiring investment banking houses to hold larger capital reserves similar to commercial banks. Major damage to the financial system “was done by inadequate regulation,” he said. In July 2008, as federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac faced major capital losses, Frank moved to increase their credit lines and to give regulators broader oversight of the two housing banks. But Frank’s counterpart in the Senate, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, chairman of the Banking Committee, was off campaigning for president in Iowa, and the Senate did not act until the middle of 2008. The legislation did increase their credit lines and provide for more supervision. But it was too late for tougher regulation to take hold, and the government placed Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship in September 2008.

Within days, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the financial markets reeled. Frank survived a major legislative test after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke told congressional leaders in a dramatic late-night session in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office that swift congressional action was needed to prevent several large financial firms from going under. The two recommended a plan for the government to purchase the bad assets of the financial institutions. Frank predicted quick agreement on the proposal, initially estimated to cost $700 billion. “It will be bipartisan, bicameral, bi-everything,” he vowed. The subsequent discussions proved harrowing, with a toxic mix of presidential campaign politics, congressional pre-election jitters in both parties, a roller-coaster ride (mostly down) on Wall Street, and spreading fears of financial panic.

While Frank played a central role in crafting the bailout, he warned Republicans of the need for bipartisan support. “This is a Bush administration initiative,” he said. To Frank’s embarrassment and dismay, 95 Democrats voted against the deal on Sept. 29 and it collapsed, 205-228, in a rank-and-file rebuke of leaders of both parties. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 777 points that day, its worst single-day point loss ever. Frank and the other negotiators went back to work on the bill and agreed to add $150 billion in tax cuts that the Senate favored. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama telephoned recalcitrant House Democrats to urge their support. Four days later, the House passed the bailout legislation, with only 63 Democrats voting no. A veteran House Democrat later complained that one of the problems with the initial bill had been Frank trying to run “a one-man show.”

By early 2009, Frank had taken such criticism to heart. He launched his committee on a mission to pass the most sweeping overhaul of banking and financial industry regulation since the Great Depression. The legislation was aimed at averting the kind of abuse-fueled meltdown that led to the government bailout. Frank led months of endless give-and-take sessions between liberals who wanted more sweeping reforms and Democratic conservatives who supported a lesser governmental role. He also had to overcome the objections of powerful financial firms and their many friends on the committee For example, he worked out a compromise with conservatives over more stringent regulation on the trading of so-called derivatives, the risky financial instruments that played a role in the economic crisis. In December 2009, Frank brought to the floor an overhaul bill that passed 223-202, although without a single Republican vote.

The legislation, 1,300 pages in length, created a new agency to protect consumers from unfair and abusive lending practices, gave the government more power to break up reeling financial firms thought to be “too big to fail,” and also required companies to set aside certain amounts in capital reserves. Like many Democrats, Frank was dismayed at the widening gap between executives’ and workers’ compensation, but he opposed having the government set limits. The legislation incorporated his idea of giving shareholders an advisory vote on executive compensation, and also banned “imprudently risky” pay incentives. House passage of the bill was a major achievement for Frank.

After the Senate passed its version in May 2010, Frank chaired the conference committee that ironed out the differences between the two chambers. Included in the final bill was creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to be financed partly by Federal Reserve funds and partly by appropriations. Agreement was reached on debit card fees, on derivatives regulation and on imposing a fiduciary duty on broker-dealers selling annuities. Frank declared that the final bill was tougher than his House version. The conference committee’s bill passed both houses and became law in July 2010. It did not, however, address the issue of Fannie and Freddie, which Frank said would have to be tackled in the 112th Congress (2011-12). “I believe the remedy is abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their present form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance,” he said. In October 2010, he reflected on his previous stands on the mortgage giants and told The Washington Post, “I was too late to see they were a problem. I did see them as an important source of rental housing. I did not foresee the extent to which bad decisions . . . were causing problems.”

As one of the House’s most productive chairmen and a trusted confidant of Speaker Pelosi, Frank was constantly at her side in meetings with top officials of the Bush and Obama administrations. “They understand each other and have similar political backgrounds. Urban, ethnic, political,” said a House insider who knows both members. “With that common background, they can communicate well, and they share the same values. Plus, humor helps.”

For all his professional accomplishments, Frank’s personal life once threatened to end his career. In 1987, in a seemingly casual answer to a reporter’s question, Frank disclosed that he is gay. Then in 1989, The Washington Times newspaper reported that Frank had employed as a personal aide a male prostitute and convicted drug user, Steve Gobie, who was also living in Frank’s apartment. He admitted paying Gobie but said he was careful never to use official or campaign funds. He also said he had ejected Gobie from his apartment. Frank voluntarily submitted to an investigation by the House Standards of Official Conduct (Ethics) Committee, which resulted in two minor charges. The committee recommended a reprimand but not censure. Frank made a contrite appearance before the House in July 1990, and the chamber voted 287-141 against censure. The vote for reprimand was 408-18. ‘‘I think members will agree that I have always had a reputation for honesty, not always tact or tolerance,’’ Frank said in his remarks to the House. Today, Frank is a leading House legislator on gay-rights issues and the sponsor of a bill to allow benefits for same-sex partners of federal employees.

From 1984 to 2008, Frank had no difficulty winning re-election. Like others in the Massachusetts House delegation, he was alert to the possibility of a Senate vacancy if John Kerry had been elected president in 2004, but that possibility never arose. Busy with financial reform and nearing 70, he showed no interest in running for the Senate after the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy in August 2009. But the election of Republican Scott Brown to Kennedy’s seat in January 2010—and the fact that Brown narrowly carried the 4th District—was a sign that Frank might face serious opposition in November 2010, and he did.

Republican Sean Bielat, a Brookline management consultant and Marine reservist, did not attract much attention when he won the September primary with 60% of the vote. But a Boston Globe poll showed Frank under the 50% support mark, leading by 46%-33%. In the first two weeks of his campaign, Bielat received $600,000 from around the country. Former President Bill Clinton came to Taunton to campaign with Frank in late September, and Frank, used to sending his campaign funds to Democrats in trouble elsewhere, focused on his own campaign, telling Politico that he didn’t intend to be ambushed by “the kind of right wing smears that assailed John Kerry in 2004 and that led to the defeat this year of responsible Republican members of Congress whose records were badly distorted by tea party-backed candidates.” Bielat criticized “bailout Barney” for his work on the financial industry rescue, and one of his ads said, “He supported policies that caused the economy to crumble.”

In the end, Frank won 53%-43%, running 7% to 11% ahead of Martha Coakley in cities and towns in the southern and central part of the district. The well-educated voters of Brookline, Newton and Wellesley split almost exactly as they had in the Brown-Coakley contest, suggesting strong party loyalties of both the liberal majority and the conservative minority. It was Frank’s lowest percentage since he first won the seat 52%-48% in 1980.

The reapportionment following the 2010 Census deprived Massachusetts of one House seat, and in early 2011, it was unclear which of the all-Democratic members of the delegation would find themselves in the same district. Frank’s strategy in the past was to insist that he would run in whatever district Brookline ended up in, which was aimed at preventing others from stealing this heavily Democratic town. In late 2009, Frank became one of the few members of Congress to generate sufficient interest to warrant a biography. Author Stuart Weisberg published Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman.