Barney Frank

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is partisan and proud of it. One of the House’s most sharp-tongued, brainy liberals, Frank gladly mounts the barricades for a host of Democratic causes, including his party’s recent effort to keep President Bill Clinton from being impeached.

But he has not always been on Clinton’s side of Washington’s policy wars. A committed liberal, Frank has repeatedly been at odds with the president who has led his party steadily to the center. When Clinton in 1997 supported a budget-balancing law that included social-program cuts Frank considered regressive, the Massachusetts Democrat pulled no punches. “We addressed a letter to the Democratic president of the United States and it came back ‘addressee unknown,’ ” Frank said at the time.

That zinger was vintage Frank. He’s a fast-talking politician, a master of the scathing one-liner. His fearsome debating skills were on display for a national audience during the House’s televised impeachment proceedings last year.

As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Frank led the Democratic campaign to portray the entire impeachment proceeding as a partisan witch hunt. Though he criticized Clinton for his relationship with a White House intern, Frank ridiculed Republicans’ perjury charges against him. He said the case boiled down to this question: “What did he touch and when did he touch it?” Defending Clinton over the last 12 months has been something of a family affair for Frank. His sister, Ann Lewis, is White House communications director.

Frank, 59, is one of only three openly gay members of Congress. He was first elected to Congress in 1980 and has been reelected six times since he came out of the closet in 1987.

In the course of the impeachment debate, Frank brought up a subject that he has spent years trying to put behind him: the ethics investigation that ended up with Frank being reprimanded by the House in 1990 on charges stemming from his relationship with a male prostitute. He cited the experience to refute Republicans who said a mere censure of Clinton would carry no weight. “I would tell you that having been reprimanded by this House of Representatives, where I’m so proud to serve, was no triviality,” he said. “I wish I could go back and undo it.”

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Question: There has been a lot of talk around Washington about the need for more bipartisanship and for the two parties to come together on major policy issues in the wake of impeachment. But you seem to suggest partisanship is not all bad.

Answer: Not at all. The first thing people have to understand is nobody in America decided there should be a party, or two parties. There’s been this natural tendency [to divide into political parties] throughout American history. . . .

America has tended to have, for most of its time, a more activist party with regard to the government and a party that wanted to do less. But that’s what we have. The notion that it’s somehow wrong for people’s fundamental philosophical underpinnings to influence your policy, I don’t understand. . . . You should not artificially inject reasons to disagree. But neither is it . . . a bad thing when there are fundamental disagreements.

In fact, what usually happens is there are agreements on sort of second- and third-level issues, where there’s not a lot of ideology written. In the midst of all the Judiciary [Committee] anger and disagreement [over impeachment] we passed a very good intellectual-property bill. Very important to Los Angeles and Hollywood. . . . A group of us who were fairly ideologically split up put together this package that defined penalties for copyright violations, and the Motion Picture Assn. of America, publishers and the recording industry as the copyright holders were involved, and the software people, hardware manufacturers, and it worked very well.

But, basically, partisanship is essential to running the country. . . . Ultimately, these questions should be decided by the voters. And the notion that the voters should elect people who should then go to Washington and compromise and never bring differences back to the voters is a very bad idea. Elections ought to be about the fundamental issues. . . .

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Q: Give us some recent examples of what you consider healthy partisanship.

A: Recently, in the Judiciary Committee and [then] in the Banking Committee, we had very serious debates. . . . The Republicans presented their majority views on the president’s budget, and they said that they didn’t see a case yet for increasing the budget of the Civil Rights Commission and the [Justice Department’s] Civil Rights Division on enforcement. There was a major partisan debate at which the Democrats said, “Yes, there is.” There’s a lot of racism in this country. We had the cops shooting the guy in New York. It was a very partisan debate. . . .

The question [before the banking committee] was: As you recognize the expansion of financial services and give banks and insurance companies and insurance people more power, should the federal government mandate that they pay special attention to the needs of lower-income people? It’s a fundamental, philosophical difference that divides the parties. It’s a good thing to debate that. . . .

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Q: So now, in the wake of impeachment, with its partisan divisions and bitterness, can the two parties work together?

A: We’re still working together. . . . We’ll work together on some things and fight about other things.

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Q: Do you think there’s much prospect you can work together on the biggest issues, such as the future of Social Security, Medicare, tax cuts and the like?

A: No. We shouldn’t, because that’s what democracy is about. These are not technical intellectual problems. They have a technical and intellectual aspect, but they’re philosophical programs.

Should we put more money in Medicare or not? There’s not a technical fix for it. . . . Why is it wrong for the public to have a major say as to whether or not we spend more on Medicare? We’re not a desperately poor society. I think we can afford to put more in Medicare. . . . We’re a fairly wealthy society. Why can we not say, “Well, as a society we want to spend this on medical care” or “We want people to be able to retire at 65”? . . .

What makes no sense is this notion that it’s somehow inappropriate for two major philosophical tendencies in this society to debate this issue together. One of the roles of a legislative body is to frame the issues for the electorate.

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Q: Many thought the impeachment process was a culmination of a different, more corrosive kind of partisanship.

A: I agree with that. But there’s no showing that that poisoned anything else. Temporarily there was a bump. . . . As we come back this year, I don’t see any carry-over. . . . I don’t know anyone who’s saying, “I’m not going to work with them, they were for impeachment.” Part of it was, even though Democrats thought impeachment was a terrible idea, nobody thought Bill Clinton was some innocent guy walking down the street who got mugged. The fact that Bill Clinton brought a good deal of this on himself . . . minimized some of that ill feeling. . . .

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Q: How about the budget?

A: The Republicans were for a tax cut. The Republican tax cut was defeated--it never got to the floor, but the 10% tax cut was defeated--but philosophically, because the public said we don’t want it. . . .

Here’s the debate: The Republicans are saying the deficit is now out of the way. The deficit is not now an argument.

They used to have two conservative arguments for not having government spending. One was the deficit. Another was [that] the economy is lagging and the government is taking too much money and that’s causing a problem with the economy. They were related, but they were somewhat separate: We’ve got to cut taxes because the level of taxation is so high it’s a drag on the economy.

It’s impossible to make that argument today. The American economy is doing very well. The deficit is not a serious problem.

So we’re now down to the fundamental philosophical question, should the government shrink, expand or contract? . . .

What Bill Clinton has figured out is this: You put this argument to the public--government spending versus a tax cut--the tax cut will win. But if you substitute for government spending Social Security, prescription drugs, cleaning up the environment, . . . almost any specific form of government spending will beat a tax cut.

That’s what we’re now maneuvering about. They’re trying to frame it as tax cuts versus government spending. They say, “If you leave the money there, [Democrats will] spend it.” You’re damn right we’ll spend it--on prescription-drug vouchers, on vocational programs. That should not be compromised. That debate ought to be taken to the public. . . .

Is Social Security too generous? Some of us say no. . . . Me, I hope I’m working at 70. I hope I’m working at 80. But if I was running a jackhammer for 30 years, I think I’d be ready to quit at 65.

The debate on Social Security is not a technical one. It is should you cut back on the extent to which we support people with legitimate needs in their retirement? Should it be 65 or 70?

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Q: Has the atmosphere in the House or the level of partisanship changed since Speaker Newt Gingrich resigned last year?

A: Not yet. I think it will probably be better. He really is a factor--more than impeachment or anything else. Newt, after all, is the one who explicitly said, 15 years ago, enough of this “let’s respect each other” stuff. He’s the one who said . . . we’ve got to stop talking about “the Democrats are reasonable people with whom we disagree.” They’re bad, they’re corrupt, they’re unpatriotic. He was a problem with this. I do think his leaving will . . . diminish that even more. . . .

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Q: Do you think the parties are farther apart and more in conflict now than when you first came to Congress in 1980?

A: Much farther apart. The parties are now more sharply differentiated than they have been in this century.

For two major reasons. First, there were about 40 covert Republicans that called themselves Democrats in the South. If you hold the South constant, there are more Democrats in the House than when I got here. But the South used to go Democrat and now goes Republican. I think that’s honest and better for the country.

Secondly, the Republicans moved further to the right. They have become even more ideological. . . .

There’s a third thing. The Democrats, in the ‘80s, were still getting over the split, the cultural split, over Vietnam and race with the AFL-CIO.

In fact, one of the most important things that’s happened in American politics is the reuniting of liberals and labor. That’s now playing out, by the way, in international trade and globalization in general, where the president is now consciously trying to work with a group in the House . . . to come up with a way to integrate human rights, worker rights and environmental concerns into international [trade]. So we don’t have that split. . . .

In approaching a global economy, there’s going to be two philosophical approaches. We’re going to be talking about an international New Deal; and the Republicans are going to be talking about what I would call international trickle down. Basically, their definition of the way to improve things in the world is simply, Let capital find its niche. . . .

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Q: Has the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment process hurt President Clinton’s relationship with congressional Democrats and the party as a whole?

A: No. It’s actually helped him some because necessity drove us together. Clinton himself was arguing in August that there is is no successful example of a party saving itself by differentiating itself from an unpopular president. He basically said, “Hey, if I go down you guys go with me.” And he’s right, for this reason: It’s just not plausible to the public. You’re out there, you’re for Clinton in ‘92, you’re for Clinton in ‘96, and then you say, “Oh, Clinton, who was that fellow?” . . .

Everybody had to recognize that the right wing was going to control the Republican Party. People couldn’t believe that they would do [it]. Are they going to impeach him? Are they nuts? . . . They’re not nuts, but they were afraid of the nuts. They listen to what the nuts say. And that drew the Democrats together. It drew our constituency together.

That’s the other thing. We do pay attention to public opinion. The fascinating thing about impeachment: Most of the time public opinion tends to drive the parties together. We’re all competing for the same voters. Public opinion generally moves in the same direction. One year, everybody’s against welfare. Another year, everybody is for restricting health-maintenance organizations. Impeachment is one of the few issues I can think of where public opinion tore the place apart. That factor helped bring Clinton and the Democrats together.