Former 16-term Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank died of congestive heart failure Wednesday at the age of 86.
First elected to the House in 1980, Frank is known for being the co-author of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank”) as well as being the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as gay.
Only weeks before his passing, he appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash” while receiving hospice care at his Maine home — where he warned that his lifelong party was lurching too far leftward.
“[A]s we succeeded in bringing the mainstream of the left into a concern with inequality, we also enabled people who wanted to use that as a platform for a wide range of social and cultural changes, some of which the public isn’t ready for,” he told CNN.
He added that gay rights activists such as himself did not start calling for same-sex marriage to be legal until “other things had been resolved.”
An early member of the left-wing Congressional Progressive Caucus, Frank also criticized his party for using strong language against people who oppose biological men participating in women’s sports.
“I think, in the interest of the transgender community, as well as others, it would be better to go at that in a more granular way, and not simply announce that, if you don’t support it, you’re a homophobe,” Frank told CNN.
Days before his CNN appearance, hetoldPolitico that he wrote a book planned for release later in 2026, criticizing his party’s modern left, who he says have “embraced an agenda that goes beyond what’s politically acceptable.”
“Until we separate ourselves from that agenda, we don’t win,” he continued.
“For a lot of my colleagues, the argument has been, ‘well, we don’t support defund the police or open borders, and we don’t say we do,’” Frank added in his April 28 comments to Politico.
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