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WASHINGTON — Former U.S. Representative Barney Frank, a quick-witted Democrat who gave his name to a landmark financial reform bill after the economic crisis of 2007-2009, has died, his sister Ann Lewis said Wednesday. He was 86.
Frank was living in Maine, where he was in hospice care in Ogunquit.
One of the best-known gay politicians of his time, Frank served for more than 30 years in the U.S. House of Representatives as a member from Massachusetts and a liberal who gladly worked with Republicans.
“He’s a guy you can sit down and deal with,” Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Cole from Oklahoma said in 2011, when Frank chaired the House Financial Services Committee.
Along with then-U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, Frank spearheaded 2010 legislation that tightened banking regulations and consumer protections to avoid a repeat of the 2007 financial crash and subsequent Great Recession.
Known as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the law led to new rules on the previously unregulated off-exchange derivatives market, and set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to shield consumers from predatory and abusive practices.
It was regarded as one of the main successes in Congress of Barack Obama’s two-term presidency.
‘Things would have sucked worse without me’
As the financial crisis was unfolding and institutions such as Lehman Brothers investment bank were collapsing, Frank was at the heart of congressional efforts to save the U.S. banking industry and limit the damage to the wider economy.
He shepherded the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bank bailout through the House in 2008.
The bailout stabilized the financial sector, with the government buying stock in eight major banks. By the time it ended in 2013, TARP had earned taxpayers a modest profit of $11 billion as the banks’ share prices recovered.
But it was criticized by some Democrats for not doing enough to help the crisis-bound housing market and for allowing bankers to receive large bonuses even as the market was crashing.
Frank defended his role in the bailout despite its flaws. “I actually had a slogan which … I was dissuaded from using, in 2010,” he told a C-SPAN event in 2014. “It said, ‘Things would have sucked worse without me.’”
A fast-talker with a rumpled appearance, Frank was frequently voted both the funniest and brainiest member of Congress by Capitol Hill staffers in the Washingtonian magazine.
But his reputation as a banking regulation guru was called into question in March 2023 when the New York-based Signature Bank, of which Frank was a board member, collapsed along with Silicon Valley Bank and was seized by regulators.
First openly gay congressman
The grandson of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Barnett Frank was born on March 31, 1940 in Bayonne, New Jersey. A high school debating star, he graduated from Harvard University and started working for the Boston mayor’s office in the late 1960s before becoming an aide to a Democratic U.S. congressman for Massachusetts.
In 1972, Frank ran for office himself, winning election as a Democrat to the Massachusetts state House where the first bill he introduced was a groundbreaking attempt to ban anti-gay discrimination in housing and employment.
The bill failed but it was the start of Frank’s long career as a defender of liberal causes. He won election to the U.S. House in 1980 and stayed there for 32 years.
Frank’s career was nearly sidelined by a 1989 scandal over his relationship with a male prostitute who became his housekeeper and driver and worked as an escort out of Frank’s home.
The House Ethics Committee investigated Frank, ruling that he did not know about the prostitution at his house but recommending the full House reprimand him for using his congressional privileges to scrap dozens of the man’s parking tickets.
The scandal did little to affect voters’ support for Frank, who in 1987 had become the first congressman in U.S. history willingly to come out as gay.
Frank became the first sitting member of Congress to marry a same-sex partner when he and Jim Ready got married in 2012.
Announcing his retirement from Congress in 2013, Frank quipped that it would be a relief, because “I don’t even have to pretend to try to be nice to people I don’t like.”
Story by Alistair Bell.
