Bye Bye, Barney
By Discover The Networks

After three decades in Congress, Rep. Barney Frank, the very embodiment of modern leftism, has announced that he will retire after completing his current term. Read more »

• Democratic congressman representing Massachusetts' Fourth District
• Has voted numerous times to slash funding for the CIA, FBI, and U.S. military
• Worked to weaken immigration laws that barred entry to the U.S. by individuals with a history of terrorist ties or subversive activities
• Was reprimanded by the House of Representatives in 1990, for having "reflected discredit upon the House" with his involvement in a sex scandal
• Promoted government policies mandating that banks and other money-lending institutions lower their lending standards in order to ensure that larger numbers of undercapitalized borrowers -- particularly nonwhite minorities -- were approved for mortgage loans See also: Congressional Progressive Caucus

Barnett "Barney" Frank was born in March 1940 to a Jewish family in Bayonne, New Jersey. He graduated from Harvard College in 1962. From 1968-1971, he served as chief assistant to Boston mayor Kevin White. He then spent a year as administrative assistant to Congressman Michael Harrington.

From 1972-1980, Frank was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. In 1977 he earned a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School; two years later he became a member of the Massachusetts Bar. Also during the 1970s, Frank was a part-time instructor at the University of Massachusetts (Boston), the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Boston University.

In 1980 Frank, a Democrat, ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Massachusetts' Fourth Congressional District and won narrowly. In 1982 the Fourth District was reconfigured geographically, and Frank won re-election by a full 20 percentage points. Since then, he has been re-elected every two years, usually by wide margins.

In May 1986 Frank co-sponsored -- along with Eleanor Holmes Norton, Gloria Steinem, and several other political and activist leaders -- a "New Directions" conference in Washington, DC which was "supported" by the Democratic Socialists of America.

Also in the 1980s, Frank criticized a federal domestic-spying program -- which monitored the activities of teachers, clerics and political activists suspected of being disloyal to America -- as a "Cold War hangover" and "a waste of time." A key supervisor of the program was former FBI special agent Robert Hanssen, who at the time was selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union.

As a member of the House of Representatives, Frank developed a reputation for consistently voting to slash funding for the CIA, the FBI, and the U.S. military. He also advocated the loosening of immigration-law exclusions that previously had served to prevent people holding totalitarian or anti-American ideologies from entering the country, and to facilitate the deportation of legal aliens who had caused unrest or had engaged in subversive activities on American soil. Frank derisively categorized such exclusions as "relics of the McCarthy era."


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