Being Frank: Congressman Gets Few Breaks in a Busy Day
WASHINGTON, April 05–Congressman Barney Frank stood impatiently, left hand pressed against his chair in room 2220 of the Rayburn House Office Building. His eyes glared at the door to his left while an audience of nearly 80 sat restlessly.
Rep. Frank, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee’s Housing and Community Opportunity Subcommittee, intended to start the hearing on schedule at 10 a.m., but couldn’t begin until two other subcommittee members arrived to fulfill the mandated quorum for a vote.
Finally, after a five-minute delay, Democrat Steve Israel of Long Island and Republican Bob Barr of Georgia arrived. Elated, Mr. Frank said, “We got it! We got it!”
His workday had begun more than an hour earlier as he immersed himself in paperwork piled high on his desk in his office, a two-hallway walk from the subcommittee’s hearing room.
March 14 was cluttered with votes, back-to-back hearings and meetings, according to the congressman’s chief of staff and press secretary, Peter Kovar. Over the course of six hours — from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. — he had a mere seven minutes to himself, which accounts for his impatient wait for a quorum. He had a quick bite to eat before he met at 2:05 p.m. with students from Newton South High School, and he took a five-minute excursion to the bathroom while he waited to testify at a Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in the late afternoon.
At 9:45 that morning, Mr. Frank, who represents Southeastern Massachusetts in Congress, entered the greeting room of his office suite to briefly discuss the impending 10 a.m. hearing with Newton Mayor David Cohen, a scheduled witness at a hearing on a Bush Administration proposal to reduce or eliminate funds for Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) to nine wealthy communities, including Newton.
Before hearing from Mayor Cohen and other witnesses on the CDBG cuts, the subcommittee voted on a bill that would allot federal dollars to alleviate the burden of brownfields. Mr. Frank expressed pleasure that federal money would aid municipalities in finding new uses for potentially contaminated industrial and commercial sites.
“This is an example of a phenomenon condemned in theory and greatly sought after in practice,” he said. “This is the federal government taxing citizens and taking the money they earned privately and then giving it to other people for public purposes. รก A lot of people seem to think taxes are terrible things until they want to spend for something.”
“I don’t think any of these communities (including Newton) have only wealthy people,” Mr. Frank said. “They are in metropolitan areas. They are communities that work very hard to promote diversity. They are communities that in the absence of government action would be more homogeneously wealthy than they are. And I do not want to see us take away some of the basic tools they use to promote diversity.”
Since 1980, Boston’s CDBG funds have been cut 5 percent and Newton’s have been cut 11 percent. Mr. Frank criticized the Bush proposal for even deeper cuts. In a meeting with students from Newton South later in the day, he said, “It’s the Bush Administration saying that they care about poor people, but they really don’t. They didn’t even send the head of HUD,” the Housing and Urban Development Department, to that morning’s important hearing on housing issues, he said.
The housing subcommittee hearing was briefly recessed at noon to permit the congressmen to zip to the House floor for votes. Mr. Frank voted for the “Two Strikes and You’re Out Child Protection Act,” which would require the imprisonment of repeat federal sex offenders; the bill passed 382-34.
When the hearing resumed at 12:35, Mr. Frank and Republican Rep. Sue W. Kelly of Westchester County, N.Y. were the only two of about 25 committee members to return to the hearing room. Five speakers, including Mr. Cohen, testified over the next hour. Mr. Frank praised the group for concise testimonies.
“I want to say that this has been the best group of witnesses that (adhere) to the five-minute rule” allotted to witnesses, he said.
“We were intimidated,” Mr. Cohen responded. The room burst into laughter.
After the hearing, Mr. Frank rushed back to his office for his first constituent meeting of the day with high school students Adam Richins of Wellesley, Jonathan Bloom of Allston and Amanda Lint of Foxboro, representing the National Youth League Conference (NYLC).
One of the first questions directed at Mr. Frank was about the life of a politician. “I (have a) talent for politics,” he said. “Particularly if you’re a representative, you deal with a lot of things in the course of one day. If I had to think about the same thing for seven hours, I’d probably get bored.”
Regarding Iraq: “Saddam Hussein is a horrible person — he shouldn’t even be allowed to drive a car,” Mr. Frank said, eliciting smiles from the trio. But he warned against invading Iraq. “Say to him: ‘If you ever use a (weapon of mass destruction), then you’re a dead man.’ It’s called deterrence. It worked with the Soviet Union.”
At 2:03, Mr. Frank took a quick break for a snack. Two minutes later, 21 students and two teachers from Newton South poured into his office. Sprawled across the office’s two couches, four chairs and even on the raspberry red carpet, the students were most intrigued with the federal government’s response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, specifically the increased funds for homeland security.
Mr. Frank criticized the Bush Administration and the House Republican leadership for their failure to scale back last summer’s $1.35 trillion tax cut after the Sept. 11 attacks. He said that homeland security must encompass more than airline security and military support and must also include health care (in the event of a bioterrorism attack) and guarding of harbors, borders and nuclear power plants. More money, he said, is also necessary for immigration control.
On several occasions, Mr. Frank displayed his dry humor with the students. After student Polina Raygorodskaya wondered how to allay fears that there might be a bomb on a plane, the Congressman quickly shot back, “You pray.”
He quickly added: “There’s nothing 100 percent safe in the world. You can’t protect everything, but you (reduce) the problem.”
At 2:45 p.m. Mr. Frank was en route to testifying at an Appropriations subcommittee hearing and took time along the walk to discuss his future in Congress. An 11-term Congressman from Massachusetts’s Fourth District seat, there seems to be no doubt about Mr. Frank’s continued re-election to the House. He is currently running unopposed, and has secured sizable victories in his re-election bids, winning 71 percent of the vote two years ago. As a senior member of the Massachusetts House delegation, Mr. Frank would be a top candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Senate if three-term Senator John F. Kerry vacates his seat in a bid for the presidency in two years.
Would a Senate seat interest Mr. Frank? “It would depend,” he said. “If (Mr. Kerry) were to resign, I’d consider it. Yes, I’d be interested if something were to open up. If something were to change here, though, and I’d be the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, then I don’t know.”
Now a few doors down from the Appropriations subcommittee hearing room, he makes a quick pit stop at the bathroom and then waits for 15 minutes in an office behind the committee room chatting with fellow Massachusetts Congressman James McGovern. The two must wait for two Pennsylvania representatives to complete their testimony so they can make their brief pleas for increased transportation funds for their districts in the next fiscal year. Mr. Frank requested $750,000 for planning and engineering studies on the Mansfield Route 106 Underpass Project and $750,000 for design and engineering studies on the Route 79 Relocation Project in Fall River.
At 3:50 p.m., the Congressman returned to his office for the remainder of the afternoon to sift through the paperwork still piled high on his desk.
An unabashed and proud liberal, Mr. Frank was recognized in a Washingtonian magazine poll of Capitol Hill aides in 2000 as the smartest and funniest House member, a label that California Congressman Tom Lantos, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, considers accurate. “He’s the smartest man in the Congress,” Mr. Lantos said as he and Mr. Frank joined other members traveling from their offices to the House floor for the day’s two votes at noon.
The compliment seemed to embarrass Mr. Frank, who responded with a slight smirk.
Written for the New Bedford Standard-Times in New Bedford, Mass.
