Barney Frank served in Congress from 1981 to 2013. Those 32 years were some of the most eventful for the American republic. And Frank was in the middle of all of it.
Frank announced on Tuesday that he was entering hospice care. He’s suffering from congestive heart failure and doesn’t have long to live.
Frank has written a book that’s bound to make waves with his own party. He says progressive Democrats have “embraced an agenda that goes beyond what’s politically acceptable.”
“Until we separate ourselves from that agenda, we don’t win,” he said in an interview with Politico on Tuesday.
He was a radical leftist with an acerbic wit and the devil’s own charm. I saw him often during my lobbying days, striding down the hallways, greeting friends and strangers alike.
He was the first U.S. congressman to come out as openly gay in 1987. Frank and his husband, Jim Ready, an avid surfer and snowboarder, were married in 2012.
But you don’t serve in Congress for 32 years and not learn something about politics. Frank believes that the party has strayed far from the mainstream and, worse, has made untenable political positions litmus tests.
His latest book is set to be released later this year (“I face a literal deadline, so I don’t know how we’ll adjust to that,” he said of the timing). He’s hoping “to use my reputation and my record of being on the left to give courage to many of my colleagues who I know agree with me but are inhibited from saying so.”
“For a lot of my colleagues, the argument has been, ‘well, we don’t support defund the police or open borders, and we don’t say we do,’” Frank said. “But my point is, no, it’s not enough … to be silent. We have to explicitly repudiate it.”
He says he’s “not arguing that anybody should stop his or her advocacy.”
“But it’s one thing to advocate something knowing that you’re going beyond the current viewpoints, and another to make it a litmus test,” he said.
There wasn’t a radical leftist cause he didn’t champion. But even Frank, a liberal’s liberal, took his party to task for many of their crazy ideas.
“I worry a little bit about the tendency on the Democratic side to fall for the flavor of the month,” he said. “There is this flirtation or this attraction of people who are new and who are very good at articulating a response to the anger, but without talking about what you do about it.”
He’s hit upon exactly why the Democrats sound incoherent. They have no logical legislative or regulatory response to Donald Trump and the Republicans, and instead, prefer shouting into the hurricane.
Frank is best known for the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill. Passed after the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent bailout of big banks, Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut took a sledgehammer to the problem when a scalpel would have worked far better. There are still efforts today to unravel some of the more onerous sections of the bill.
The radicals in charge of the Democratic Party aren’t going to listen to Barney Frank. They aren’t going to listen to anyone who disagrees with them.
God help us if they ever get into power.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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