Barney Frank, the longtime Democratic congressman from Massachusetts who co-authored the Dodd-Frank Act, died on Tuesday night at the age of 86.
Frank represented the 4th District of Massachusetts in the US House of Representatives from 1981 through 2013. He served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee from 2007-2011. Earlier in his career he was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1973 to 1981.
Frank was a controversial figure in the midst of the crises that culminated with the Great Recession. He received campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which critics claimed influenced him to avoid reforming the government-sponsored enterprises prior to their seizure into federal conservatorship in 2008. His failure to use his congressional authority to adequately address the subprime mortgage market was also cited as contributing to the economic meltdown.
The Dodd-Frank Act, which he co-authored with Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, was designed to address the multiple problems that fueled the Great Recession through regulatory reforms. But the legislation was criticized for its creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which many detractors as an onerous bureaucracy obsessed with punishing the financial service industry.
In 1987, Frank became the first member of Congress to publicly self-identify as gay. Frank was at the center of a scandal involving a male prostitute named Steve Gobie that resulted in a 1990 congressional reprimand of Frank when it was determined that he used his office to fix 33 parking tickets for Gobie. Frank was also accused of writing a memo designed to shorten Gobie`s probation for sex and drug convictions, which contained misleading statements on his relationship with Gobie; the memo was not sent but later came into the possession of probation authorities. Frank married his long-time partner James Ready in 2012, becoming the first member of Congress in a same-sex marriage.
After leaving Congress, Frank joined the board of directors of the New York City-based Signature Bank. Prior to his passing, he was receiving hospice care at his home in Ogunquit, Maine, for congestive heart failure and gave several media interviews lamenting the state of the Democratic Party. He authored a book titled “The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy” that is scheduled for publication in September.
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