Barney Frank

Politician

• Born: March 31, 1940
• Place of Birth: Bayonne, New Jersey

POLITICIAN

Frank, an openly gay member of the House of Representatives, takes a liberal position on many civil rights issues.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Government and politics; social issues

Early Life

Barney Frank was born Barnett Frank in Bayonne, New Jersey, into a close-knit Jewish community and a family with a tradition of social activism. Even as a teenager, he was fascinated by the work of Congress and thought about running for office but was concerned that his ethnic background would work against him. He graduated from high school in 1957 (stating in the yearbook that his future career would be as a lawyer) and was accepted at Harvard University, which he attended for ten years, completing a bachelor’s degree in 1961 and going on to do graduate work in government and serve as a teaching fellow. His interest in politics was expressed through articles in the Harvard Review and working for several Democratic Party candidates. In 1967, he was asked to work on Kevin White’s eventually successful campaign for mayor of Boston. He served as executive director of White’s staff recruitment team and quickly gained a favorable reputation in the Boston press as a knowledgeable and respectable politician. He maintained an academic connection by teaching a seminar at Harvard on Boston city government, at which many of his colleagues were guest speakers. He resigned from the Boston administration after three years and took a post in 1971 as chief of staff for Representative Michael Harrington in Washington, DC.

Life’s Work

Frank’s debating skills, versatile command of language, and deft sense of humor quickly marked him as a figure to remember. Some of the issues with which he is most closely associated in Congress—housing and opposition to wasteful spending—are continuations of his legislative work in Massachusetts. He began to create a distinctive political identity while on Harrington’s staff and in March 1972, won his first election in Massachusetts in Boston’s Ward 5 to a slate for upcoming legislature seats. His high local profile and concern for holding state legislators directly accountable for action on neighborhood issues (unlike city officials, whose population base was citywide) enabled him to mount a strong campaign. He was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1972 (managing to earn a law degree from Harvard in 1977) and served eight years before successfully running for the congressional seat vacated by Robert Drinan, a Roman Catholic priest, as a result of a papal order in 1981. A highlight of the race was a letter by Cardinal Humberto Sousa Medeiros of Boston calling upon all Catholics to oppose candidates who did not support right-to-life legislation. It was issued on Rosh Hashanah, at a time when Frank had suspended campaigning for the religious holiday and could not respond.

His first term was marked by appointments to the Select Committee on Aging, the Government Operations Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and the Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee, an unusual concentration for a freshman congressman and in part the result of support from House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. He continued to define himself as a liberal Democrat but did not adhere to a strict liberal platform on all issues. A redistricting move by the Massachusetts legislature based on population shifts forced Frank to oppose sixteen-year congressional veteran Margaret Heckler in a bid to retain his House seat in 1982. Despite the redrawn boundaries of the Fourth District (which resulted in changing Frank’s constituency substantially by adding a large number of blue-collar communities), he mounted a diverse campaign (which included two debates that gained massive media attention) and successfully connected with his new constituents to win reelection with a solid margin over Heckler.

It was not until 1980 that Frank began quietly coming out to his family and friends, and in April 1980, he appeared as the featured speaker at Gay and Lesbian Awareness Day at Harvard but did not disclose his sexual orientation. After his reelection in 1984, he informed some of his congressional colleagues, but his public coming out was sparked by the publication of a book by former congressman Robert Bauman of Maryland, who noted Frank’s attendance at the Washington, DC, Gay Pride Day celebrations. Frank deferred discussing his private life until he could do so in the Boston Globe, and in May 1987, he came out in an interview, noting that he did not consider being gay relevant to his work in Congress but also that he was not embarrassed at being who he was. His constituents solidly backed him in this, returning him to office in 1988 with a massive percentage of the eligible voters in his district.

During his second term, Frank became heavily involved in the ongoing debate on immigration reform, a focus of his interest for the next decade. He supported the idea of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants who had entered the United States before a certain date but sanctioning employers who knowingly hired them after that time. The text of an amendment drafted by him calling for the creation of a special counsel to handle complaints of discrimination from noncitizen employees was adopted by the House of Representatives in 1984. The 1952 immigration law excluding those who practiced “sexual deviation,” which effectively kept lesbians and gay men from permanent entry, was another of his legislative targets. In 1983, Frank was one of a group of thirty-five members of the House who cosponsored a bill proposing the repeal of the relevant section, and in 1985 he rewrote the section of the immigration law that listed legitimate bases for excluding a potential citizen, omitting the antigay text. Over the next three years, he worked to build support for the final reform bill, requiring only that the sexual-orientation provision not be restored. The new language was proposed as a separate bill in 1988 and passed with solid bipartisan support, and it was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.

Frank’s work on legislation addressing various civil rights issues for gays and lesbians fit well with his long-standing commitment to exploring creatively the role government could and should play in establishing social justice for its citizens. In his book-length essay Speaking Frankly (1992) he set forth a challenge to his readers to rethink the assumptions underlying social problems such as racism, crime, and antigay prejudice, while preserving a respect for the democratic process and its varied freedoms. A lengthy investigation by the House Ethics Committee of allegations made by a former associate of Frank resulted in the House voting to reprimand him in 1990, but his open response to the charges and admission of misjudgments led his constituents to return him to his seat.

In 2009 Frank, along with Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, proposed what would become known as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a response to the financial crisis of 2007–2010. The act, which had the most far-reaching effects on financial regulation of any legislation since the aftermath of the Great Depression, was signed into law in 2010. Frank also served as chair of the House Financial Services Committee from 2007 to 2011, a term coinciding with the subprime mortgage crisis. During the crisis, he played an important role in getting Democrats and Republicans to cooperate on measures to address the issue.

Other issues Frank focused on in his time in Congress include drug law reform, affordable housing, environmental protection, reduction of military spending, and rehabilitation of criminals. Frank ultimately served sixteen terms in the House, retiring in 2013. He published an autobiography, Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage, in 2015. While retired and no longer a member of Congress, Frank was in the House of Representatives on December 8, 2022, to witness the passage of Respect for Marriage Act. The act, signed into law by President Joe Biden, required the federal government and all US states and territories to recognize the validity of same-sex and interracial marriage in the United States.

Frank came under fire in 2024 for being on the board of New-York-based Signature Bank. During his congressional career, Frank had helped overhaul the United States' banking regulations. After his retirement, Frank joined the board of Signature Bank. Two years later, the US Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission accused the bank of not detecting its customers' money laundering and becoming too heavily involved in cryptocurrency. Banking regulators shut down Signature Bank. Frank insisted that he was unaware of the bank's actions.

Significance

In his lengthy career as a member of the United States Congress, Frank combined a sense of social justice with a deep knowledge of the legislative process and a deft skill at political negotiation and compromise. He brought with him to Congress an established sensibility that a politician should attempt to serve and improve society and directly address and acknowledge major problems while working to craft pragmatic solutions across party lines. In the 1993 debates over the military’s ban of gays and lesbians (popularly known as the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy) he proposed an unsuccessful compromise measure allowing homosexual members of the armed forces to live openly off-post but requiring them to be closeted while on duty. He also was instrumental in effecting the removal of the use of homosexuality as grounds for the exclusion of immigrants by revising the McCarran-Walter Act and served as a cosponsor for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Outside the arena of public life, Frank’s decision to come out served as an inspiration to many closeted men and women that it was possible to be who they were without sacrificing their dreams of contributing to the betterment of American society.

Bibliography

Frank, Barney. Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage. New York: Farrar, 2015. Print.

Frank, Barney. "My Life as a Gay Congressman." Politico. Politico, 12 Mar. 2015. Web. 24 Mar. 2016.

Frank, Barney. Speaking Frankly: What’s Wrong with the Democrats and How to Fix It. New York: Times, 1992. Print.

Geraghty, Jim. "If Barney Frank Were a Republican, He's Be the Media's Banking Crisis Villain." National Review, 17 Mar. 2023, www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/if-barney-frank-were-a-republican-hed-be-the-medias-banking-crisis-villain/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the

Kaiser, Robert G. Act of Congress: How America's Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn't. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.

Toobin, Jeffrey. "Barney's Great Adventure." New Yorker. Conde Nast, 12 Jan. 2009. Web. 24 Mar. 2016.

Weisberg, Stuart E. Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman. Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2009. Print.