Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (43 page)

The TARP bill that followed was an insufficiently understood bipartisan accomplishment. Indeed, there’s no more compelling example in our peacetime history of one party in Congress putting aside any consideration of political advantage and extending complete cooperation to a president of the opposite party. The Bush administration’s request for extraordinary legislative powers came at the most fraught time in America’s political calendar—six weeks before a presidential election. Conventional wisdom about politics says that in that time frame, as things got worse for the country, the fortunes of Republican candidates should have been devastated. Despite this, Pelosi, Reid, Chris Dodd (chairman of the Senate Banking Committee), and I, with the full backing of the other Democratic leaders in both houses, did everything we could to ensure adoption of the administration’s plan. At no point in any of the Democratic strategy sessions in which I participated—and I was part of all the important ones—did anyone even allude to the electoral benefits we would reap if we made a convincing show of being helpful but stopped short of the extraordinary effort that would be needed to guarantee success. To the extent we had any political motive for seeking to restrict executive compensation and protect taxpayers, it was to win votes in the House and Senate, not on Election Day.

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Our role was critical because Democrats were not only supportive of the Bush position but also far more supportive than his fellow party members, who’d become so hostile to government action. In one of the most unexpected emotions I’d had since discovering at fourteen that I was sexually attracted to other males, I came to feel sympathy for Spencer Bachus, the Financial Services Committee’s ranking Republican member. His obvious instinct to be helpful was overruled by the Republican leadership. This put him in the humiliating position of attending bipartisan meetings under the explicit instruction that he was neither to agree to anything nor to explain very clearly why not. The House Republican whip, Eric Cantor, did put forward a scheme for some form of insurance against failure that Paulson knew would do no good. The treasury secretary unsuccessfully tried to downplay his views of Cantor’s approach in the interest of intraparty comity. Unable to fully observe our partisan monasticism, we Democrats needled Paulson into giving his real opinion of Cantor’s proposal.

As negotiations over our financial rescue package accelerated, the presidential campaign pitting Barack Obama against John McCain intruded itself. On September 24, John McCain endorsed the House Republicans’ refusal to support our efforts. He also insisted on delaying the upcoming presidential debate and suspending his campaign so that he could fly to D.C. and settle what he claimed was a serious enduring dispute over the bill. As I put it at the time, McCain’s maneuver was “the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys.”

Furious at being blindsided while I was doing everything I could to maximize Democratic votes for a politically unappealing bill, I called Paulson and vented. I do not remember everything I said, but I do recall beginning the conversation with the phrase “What the fuck.” He did his best to mollify me and assured us that he and the president were doing everything they could to keep their copartisans on board. In fact I knew that this was true, but at that point in a very tension-filled week, I had to yell at somebody.

I’d previously had good relations with McCain. I had been his ally in passing the McCain-Feingold, Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform bill—in the good old days before five Supreme Court justices decreed that unlimited campaign spending was a constitutional necessity. But I did realize that when I analogized his intervention in the TARP talks to Mighty Mouse singing, “Here I come to save the day,” I would weaken the bonds of our friendship.

At McCain’s behest, President Bush convened a special White House meeting. I am told that the administration, probably with McCain’s eager acquiescence, had sought to leave me off the list of attendees. But that would have required excluding Bachus, as well as Shelby and Chris Dodd, so I was included—a form of access by association. In any case, if the ensuing events had been portrayed on
The West Wing
, they would have been criticized as an outrageous departure from that show’s sober, realistic depiction of national politics. (I will pass over the bizarrely scripted dark fantasy of
House of Cards
, which too many uninformed viewers believe bears some remote resemblance to the facts.)

The meeting was ideal from our standpoint. Pelosi and Reid began the session by designating Senator Obama our spokesman. When he finished agreeing with the Bush administration’s stance, it was obviously McCain’s turn to speak. But he didn’t—at least not substantively. He said that he was attending to make sure that House Republicans were given a chance to present their view, and he declined to state his own preference. The other Democrats reiterated our support for the president. We also repeated our request that McCain tell us what he thought personally was the best way to proceed, and he continued to refuse. I joined in pressing him, unaware, until I was informed later, that I had violated protocol by speaking out in a meeting with the president without having been called on. In my defense I noted that the president had made no effort to run the meeting and had in fact sat there throughout looking bemused. One of my Republican colleagues whispered to me that he looked as if he was already mentally back in Texas.

While I was not the only one seeking an answer from McCain, I did take pride in learning from Paulson’s later report that McCain had called him the next day to explain that “the reason I didn’t say anything at the end was because it’s pretty hard to say anything with Barney Frank screaming at you.” I do not think that my admittedly emphatic tone qualified as screaming, and in any case that does not explain why he hadn’t said anything substantive at any other point in the session. Any responsibility I might have felt for McCain’s silence dissolved when Jim pointed out that it seemed highly unlikely that a man who had shown incredible bravery in resisting North Vietnamese torture would be intimidated because I raised my voice in a White House meeting.

After Bush dismissed us, with obvious relief, the Democratic participants caucused to help Obama decide what he would say to the assembled media in the White House driveway. That caucus proved memorable. Paulson joined us, got down on one knee before Pelosi, and begged her not to react to his party’s theatrics by moving away from the deal. She didn’t—although my recollection is that she did move slightly away from the startling sight of a kneeling secretary of the treasury.

Pelosi was good to her word, as she has always been in my experience, and we went back to the House to prepare for the vote. With both parties in the Senate strongly supportive, it was clear that the outcome turned on the House, where Democrats would have to supply the bulk of the votes. The Democratic leadership launched a full-scale effort to muster support.

I became the bill’s main presenter. Over the next two evenings, I spent hours explaining and defending it to our undecided members. Fortunately, we had more votes when these sessions concluded than we had at the start.

*

Through all the stress and strain that fall, Jim remained the most understanding partner. He had not signed up for a D.C.-based relationship. Herb and Sergio had lived in Washington; Jim did not. His business was in Maine, where he had put up a large share of the awnings on the businesses lining Main Street in Ogunquit. His house was a short distance from his favorite surfing sites, and he was also within a few hours’ drive of good snowboarding locales. In the first months of 2007, I did not foresee any serious problem with our two homes. Being chairman does put more demands on your time, but offsetting that is the control you have over the committee’s schedule. With somewhat more attention to time management than I was used to, I could give both my personal and official lives the time—and, more important, the emotional energy—required.

Then came the crisis. By 2008, Jim was sharing my Friday afternoon doses of bad news from Paulson and becoming one of Ogunquit’s leading authorities on subprime mortgages, securitization, and failing financial institutions. The equanimity with which he made the transition from being a purely private citizen, practicing his craft in a small town, to immersion in a global financial crisis was one of the greatest gifts I have ever received.

The week Lehman collapsed, I was scheduled to attend a road race in memory of my mother, held by Kit Clark House, a leading social service group in Boston; the fall dinner of the Harvard LGBT organization; the Working Waterfront Festival in New Bedford; and a dinner for the prime minister of Cape Verde. These were no-stress, celebratory events with an interesting range of convivial people, none of whom would want to talk about financial gloom and doom. We never got to attend any of them. Instead, I called Jim from D.C. after the second grim meeting of that week to ask a big favor. I would be spending the weekend at the Capitol and I wanted him there to help me get through what I knew would be a very stressful time. He agreed to join me.

On Saturday morning, we were on the way from the Capitol subway to Pelosi’s office when we were spotted by a crowd of journalists. They rushed toward us, cameras bobbing, mikes recording, and pads outthrust. Unused to even a peaceful horde rushing toward him, Jim was startled, and his wonderful protective instinct toward me kicked in. The result was a photo that went across the country showing Jim, with his eyes wide and his mouth open, holding his arm like a shield in front of me. It looked like an outtake from a cheesy Western when the heroes are surprised by the sudden appearance of a very large number of hostile Indians. Fortunately in this case, the charging crowd was unarmed, although not entirely unhostile.

Later that weekend, he joined the group of staffers and others who sat outside the conference room while we tried to reach a deal on the TARP legislation. At some point, Rahm Emanuel had been warned by his staff that accounts of our private session were being sent out electronically. Channeling Wyatt Earp, he stood up and demanded everybody’s BlackBerry—not mine, since I don’t like them. He put the devices in a wastebasket and then spread them out on a table in another room to be picked up after the meeting.

Jim wasn’t in the midst of these proceedings because we wanted to make a point. He was there because I needed personal support. But the point was being made nevertheless. One of a handful of people engaged in the highest level of policy making in the American government at a time of crisis was a gay man accompanied by his partner. Major political players would recognize the significance of this in various ways. In his memoir of the crisis, Hank Paulson noted that when he wanted to speak privately with me at a time when the negotiators had temporarily taken a break and scattered to separate places, his aides found Barney Frank “on the third floor [of the Capitol] having dinner with his partner, Jim Ready, and asked him to meet with us.” Given that Paulson’s memoir was published in 2011, when same-sex marriage was still strongly opposed by most Republicans, this was an example of gratuitous niceness.

When I presented the bill to our caucus, I witnessed an expression of what by then was virtually unanimous Democratic support for same-sex marriage. The party leadership provided buffet dinners at these sessions. When one of my turns onstage ended up lasting more than an hour, I said that I hoped that we wouldn’t run out of Chinese food before my colleagues ran out of questions. Jim had been watching from the side of the room where the staff assembles, holding a plate of food for me but refraining from delivering it to me onstage on the assumption that it would be a breach of decorum. Still unaccustomed to treating an important meeting of a hundred and fifty or so congresspeople as if it was his kitchen, he tried very hard to be inconspicuous. Within seconds, he was spotted as he cautiously came forward to hand me the plate and was greeted with a spontaneous, affectionate “aaw”—as in, “isn’t that cute”—from the female members, followed by cheers from most of the room. This enthusiastic vocal affirmation of a gay relationship from members of Congress in the midst of these tense, high-stakes deliberations was incredibly moving. America—and I—had come a long way since 1954.

Democrats were not the only members who welcomed Jim’s presence. He told me a few nights later that when he ran into a Republican member with whom I had regular, not always harmonious, dealings, he was told, “I figured you were in town. Barney was nicer to me today than is usual.”

As the TARP vote approached, the Republican leadership was also lobbying their members, with Democratic majority leader Steny Hoyer and Republican whip Roy Blunt coordinating their efforts. When we believed we were as strong as we were going to be, Pelosi brought the compromise bill to the floor on Monday, September 29. To the world’s shock, the bill failed. While Democrats voted 140 to 95 for the bill, Republicans voted heavily against it, 65 to 133, providing significantly fewer yes votes than everyone knew would be needed for passage. It is fair to say that many members voted no while praying yes, as an old legislative adage has it. Such an outcome illustrates the fundamental mistake of applying Lord Acton’s famous dictum in all contexts. I agree that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” where it exists in authoritarian governments. But in the legislative bodies of representative governments, it is not power that corrupts but impotence. Members of a parliamentary minority are much more likely to vote no on a substantively necessary, politically unpopular measure than the majority who know they will bear some collective responsibility for failure. Anyone doubting this need only look at the behavior of those many members—myself included—who voted against raising the debt limit when in the minority but proclaimed the need to be responsible and vote yes in the majority. (I am hopeful that the debacle of 2013 has put a stop to this particular form of gamesmanship.)

With the defeat on the first vote, and the entirely predictable stock market crash that followed, our efforts went into higher gear. Even before the final vote was tallied, I made one important intervention. When the scoreboard showed that the noes were going to win, the leaders of both parties rushed to the well of the House to try to get members to switch from no to yes. This is a common pattern on close votes, although usually the party leaderships are working against each other. I am ordinarily a supporter of my party’s efforts in such cases, and sometimes a participant. But this time I knew it would be disastrous. Passing TARP through a very public display of pressure on members would have added to the widespread view that the establishment was rigging the game to favor their powerful friends. Fortunately, several others shared my views, and we succeeded in persuading everyone involved to back off, accept defeat for the day, and work in a calmer manner for passage.