Former Democratic Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives for three decades, died on Tuesday night at the age of 86, family members and his former campaign said.
Frank died late on Tuesday, his former campaign manager, Jim Segel, and members of his family told media outlets on Wednesday.
“He was, above all else, a wonderful brother. I was lucky to be his sister,” Frank’s sister Doris Breay told WCVB 5 TV, an ABC News affiliate station in Boston, confirming his death.
Segel told Axios that Frank had “notified everybody that he was in hospice, so it was just a matter of time. He was certainly at peace with himself.”
He noted that Frank “helped the country get through the 2008 financial crisis, which was the most significant recession, depression, almost since 1930,” adding that he was also an important actor on civil rights-related issues during his time in Congress.
He entered hospice there in April and gave an interview to The Associated Press at the time.
“I hope I made the point that the best way to accomplish the improvements in our society that we need, particularly in making it less unfair economically and socially, is by conventional political methods,” Frank told the outlet.
“The main obstacle to our defeating populism and going further in the right direction is that mainstream Democrats have to make it clear that we oppose that part of the agenda of our friends on the left that is politically unacceptable. They’re right about a lot of things but you have to have some discretion.”
Frank also appeared to chide left-wing members of the Democratic Party in the interview.
“You should not take the most unpopular parts of your agenda and make them litmus tests,” he said. “And that’s what my friends on the left have been doing.”
Born in 1940 in Bayonne, New Jersey, Frank entered politics in 1968 as an aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White, then won a seat in the Massachusetts House in 1972. Frank was elected to Congress in 1980, an otherwise dismal year for Democrats as the party lost dozens of seats in the U.S. House and Republican Ronald Reagan won the White House.
Frank helped develop one of the most significant financial reform bills since the New Deal. Working with then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the Dodd-Frank Act would enhance consumer protections, impose new capital requirements on banks, and boost the ability of regulators to monitor risk.
The bill was enacted in 2010 in response to the 2007–2008 financial crisis, creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency tasked with protecting consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive financial practices relating to mortgages, credit cards, or student loans. The bill was also aimed at ending so-called “too big to fail” bailouts of companies, among other issues.
Segel did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times request for comment on Wednesday.
Frank is survived by his sisters, longtime Democratic strategist Ann Lewis and Doris Breay, and his brother, David Frank.