Barney Frank’s death deserves the attention and respect that it’s getting. The former U.S. representative was smart, irascible, accomplished, and a genuine character in a sea of bland pols. When he was the chief of staff to Boston Mayor Kevin White in the 1970s, J. Anthony Lukas described Frank as “an anachronism: a Jew from Bayonne, New Jersey, who delivered his wisecracks in a thick ‘Joisey’ accent through billows of smoke from a cigar which looked like one of Hoboken’s belching smokestacks.” Much will be said about Frank. For me, his death is a timely reminder of how much Congress has changed in terms of dealing with sexual improprieties—in some ways for the better and many for worse.
There’s still far too much sexual predation on Capitol Hill, as the recent ouster of Representative Eric Swalwell reminded us. The California Democrat has been accused of everything from untoward direct messages to, according to one alleged victim, rape. As is typical these days, his case was not adjudicated in court (although it probably will be) or thoroughly investigated by the House Ethics Committee. Instead, following a not-unfamiliar pattern, a combination of well-crafted leaks, public revulsion, and pressure from his colleagues forced his resignation, even though he was a strong contender for the gubernatorial nomination back home. I shed no tears.
This is how it is done these days. The scandal breaks. The elected representative is pushed out. Sometimes this seems appropriate, as with Swalwell, and sometimes it surely doesn’t, as with Al Franken, the former U.S. Senator from Minnesota and comedian, who faced charges of lewd gestures while on a USO show and of being somewhat handsy back in 2017, before resigning in January 2018. As Jane Mayer documented in The New Yorker, there’s reason to believe conservative enemies of the talented politician and author largely manufactured the Franken scandal. But they could not have succeeded without Democrats being in a true moral panic. Hoping to pick up a Senate seat in a special election in Alabama in 2017, Democrats didn’t want to be seen as being soft on Franken when the Republican nominee in that 2017 race, Roy Moore, was widely accused of having a decades-long and grotesque propensity for hitting on teenage girls. Democrats raced to then-Twitter and called on him to resign.
I wrote in 2019 that I thought Franken was treated unfairly, as was Representative Katie Hill, a California Democrat, who was forced to resign after it emerged she was having a throuple-like relationship. There, too, the ethics process was short-circuited as Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pushed her out. Nude pics of Representative Hill with a bong, and an Iron Cross tattoo (no Totenkopf) didn’t help her. But she was both victim and perpetrator; Hill, then-32, said her ex-husband had leaked the photos.
As I wrote at the time: “This is nuts. A system where some members are quickly forced out because of behind-the-scenes pressure, and others are allowed to linger, is not only opaque, it’s unfair. It doesn’t set up a clear deterrent for behavior ranging from icky to illegal.”
This is where the case of Barney Frank comes in and the irony that in the less enlightened 1980s, we dealt with these cases, as I wrote, “with greater maturity and forethought than we do now … in a way that allowed for punishment, let everyone in Congress vent, and put the voters in charge.”
Frank, who co-authored the 2009 Dodd-Frank banking reform law, came close to losing his seat in 1989 after a conservative outlet, The Washington Times, discovered that he’d lived with and had solicited sex from a male prostitute, Steve Gobie. The “bisexual hooker,” as the press dubbed him at the time, had told Frank he wanted out of prostitution, and Frank gave him money and hired him for errands and such, paying him with his own cash, not taxpayer money. But when the rising member of Congress discovered Gobie was still turning tricks, he kicked him out of his Capitol Hill flat where he was staying, and cut ties. When Gobie told his story to the Times, Frank seemed like political roadkill. He was, after all, in the closet, and the Democrats still reeling from their third consecutive presidential defeat had every reason to cut Frank loose. The then-Speaker of the House, Jim Wright a moderate Texas Democrat could have shoved him out, a la Franken.
What happened was just: Frank was reprimanded by the House 408–18. Everyone got a chance to vent their moral outrage. And, of course, the voters kept the whip hand. They considered what had happened and kept sending Frank back to the House for another 20 years. He won 66 percent of the vote in his first bid after the reprimand in his seat.
As I noted in the short-lived GEN Magazine from Medium:
That wasn’t a one-off exception. In 1983, Gerry Studds, another Massachusetts Democrat, was caught having an affair with a 17-year-old male congressional page. The young man may have reached the age of consent, but the liaison was rightly denounced. I remember the incident well because I was about the same age as Studds’ lover, and I lived part of the year in his district, which included Cape Cod. Studds was censured 420–3. Congress made its point. Then the voters had their say: Studds won another seven terms and used his seniority with and chairmanship of the (since-dismantled) House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries to do a lot for the district. I remember all the deep-sea crews with Studds stickers on their pickups. By the way, Studds, who died in 2006, later married the young man, Dean Hara, who had always claimed the relationship was consensual. Conversely, Dan Crane, a House Republican from Illinois, who had an affair with a 17-year-old page at the same time Studds was censured, lost his reelection bid (perhaps because the district was more conservative or he was more of a hypocrite). Either way, the voters got to decide.
Congress really would have been a lesser place if Frank had been pressured to leave in 1989; a great career would have been cut short. Lest this seem partisan, I’m glad Representative Crane, a right-winger, faced censure rather than being forced out by then House Minority Leader Bob Michel. Members will come and go, and there’s no way to ensure that due process always prevails because Congress is political, not judicial, though it has quasi-judicial functions at times, such as in impeachment. But the case of Barney Frank is a reminder that it’s better to err on the side of pausing, adjudicating, and, if possible, letting voters decide.
