 Good evening. I'm Harold Pacius. We're back with another edition of Pacius on the News. We try to get interesting guests for you every month. And in this case, I don't think there's anybody more interesting, whether you agree with them or not agree with them. I think this guy is one of the better minds in the United States. He's quick. He's witty. He's well-informed. And I'm delighted that he came here to talk with you tonight. His name is Barney Frank, former congressman from Massachusetts Fourth District, 32 years in Congress Barney, huh? Yes. 1980. You got elected? I came with Reagan. Came with Reagan. And actually, you had a great career, 32 years in Congress. But you had Pope John Paul II to thank for that. I did. Although I never got a chance to do it in person. And the reason for that is that Father Robert Drinen occupied that seat. He was a Jesuit, wasn't he? And the Pope said, we don't want you in Congress anymore. And you know, it's a career dedicated to obedience. He got out and Barney came in. Yeah, we don't think... I guess that is probably not an example of papal infallibility. No. Were you and Drinen fairly good friends? Yes. I'd actually met... Your father Drinen had been the dean of Boston College Law School, first-rate Jesuit institution in the district I used to represent. And he got out to the Congress in 1970. My then boss, Kevin White, was running for governor. And we did a lot of campaigning together. So I'd known him very well. Even before that, he'd been head of the Civil Rights Commission affiliate in Boston. So yeah, I knew him very well and was very fond of him. And you know, obviously I had very mixed feelings. I was sorry to see him go. It was an opportunity for me, but it was unfortunate that he had to leave. The woman... Was Margaret Heckler there before him? No. Margaret Heckler, who was the senior Republican cons at the time, represented and adjoining district. In Wellesley, huh? She was in Wellesley. Father Drinen was in Newton. She was in Wellesley, two next-door communities. Drinen's district went from the city of Newton, northwest in Boston. Heckler's district went from the town of Wellesley down into the southern Massachusetts for River and Taunton. So I replaced Drinen. She was reelected that year. But in 1982, when Massachusetts lost one seat in the house by population, the legislature threw me and with her, actually the president of the state Senate at the time, William Bulger, was very angry at me for something I had done earlier. We had a group of us created, helped create an African-American Senate district, which hadn't been allowed to exist before. And part of that came from his district. So he was looking to get even with me. So when we lost the seat, he tried very hard to make it my seat. So they took my district and split it into five pieces and put a little piece of it in with Mrs. Heckler. The problem was she'd been a moderate to the Liberal Republican of the time we don't have anymore. And she had to choose. She had to choose voting for the Reagan program or not. If she didn't vote for the Reagan program, she'd be afraid of a primary, kind of like you have today in the Republican Party. So she voted for it and it got lost to the support of the elderly and the unions and the environmentalists. A lot of the people had been supportive of her as a Liberal Republican. So she and I ran against each other in 1982 and I won. It's a very interesting story. Now, Barney, you grew up in Bayonne, Bayonne, New Jersey. Your father had a truck stop under the Pulaski Skyway, for those of you in the audience who've been in that part of New Jersey in the old days, in the 1920s and 1930s and before the New Jersey Turnpike. If you went south from Maine, you'd find yourself at some point on the Pulaski Skyway. U.S. Route 1. U.S. Route 1. So all right. So I think most people know a lot about you. They've seen you on television a lot. So let's get to something very topical. Now, note for the audience. You're going to see this on Wednesday night at 7 p.m. Because of Barney's schedule, we're taping this on Monday afternoon, about 48 hours before you're going to watch it. So things change very quickly in Washington. No one knows what's going to happen in the next 48 hours with respect to this effort by Republicans in the House to defund or postpone the effective date of Obamacare, so-called Obamacare. So Barney, can Tea Party Republicans actually bring down the government? Well, first, let me congratulate you. Well, you just said I wish it was routine. I can't tell you how many times I've been interviewed and they say, oh, by the way, this isn't going to air for two days, but pretend it's contemporary. And I find that the journalists who are always critical politicians, if we are not being 100 percent honest, then want us to play this game. But the answer is yes, they can. Unfortunately, we have a government that we call checks and balances. It was developed by men in the late 18th century who assumed that there would be people who believed in the system. And it therefore is a system which is easier to stop than to keep going. And yeah, the Tea Party Republicans can do this in this way. They are not a majority among House Republicans, but they are a large faction in House Republicans. And they have, with their allies, been skillful at intimidating the rest of the House Republicans, so that you have a speaker of the House who is literally afraid to bring a bill to the floor that would get a very large majority of votes, Democrats and Republicans, just to keep the government going because his members would then be confronted with challenges in the primary from the Tea Party people. So I mean, one of two things is going to have to happen in the long run. Either mainstream Republicans are going to have to take their party back and start winning seats. And we're not talking about liberal Republicans even. We're talking about Bob Dole-type conservatives, George W. Bush-type conservatives, or they have to be defeated. I mean, if the Republican Party is going to remain the tool of this very right-wing group, then I hope the public will say, well, you're just not people who should be in power. But the problem is those folks are often in gerrymandered districts where a moderate can't even win. That's true. And so that's what's an interesting dynamic. The pressure is really on the more moderate, not only a handful of moderate Republicans, but more regular conservative Republicans. And some of them are afraid that people are going to say, you know what, you're not a bad guy. But as long as you're in office and you're going to vote to keep this, your party in power, then you're giving all the power over to this band of extremists. So I think what you're seeing is interesting is some of the Republicans, Peter King of New York, Charles Dent of Pennsylvania, people won't be familiar with them. But they are conservative to moderate Republicans. They're afraid that they're going to lose their seats. You're right, that the hard-line seats of the right-wing, they could win primaries, because that's who votes in those primaries. But the danger for the Republican Party is that people will be so angry at the extremists that they will vote against other Republicans saying, look, we can't afford to keep you in control of the House if you're going to let this minority dictate to you. So what's going to happen? Let's go to a little bit to the mechanics of what's going on. You're 32 years in Congress, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, a real player, author of Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation Law. So you've been around and you've been in these kinds of fights, not exactly like this. So we may have a shutdown by the time that people watch this program. As of now, I think that's the likely thing. And here's what I think the situation is. By the way, I do have one funny little story in mind. I want you to tell a funny story. My assistant, Courtney Flynn, who's with me now, has a three-plus-year-old daughter named Kiwi, who comes to my office. She was at a, with a group of people the other day and somebody was talking about Dodd-Frank and she corrected them and said, no, my name was Barney Frank, not Dodd-Frank. She didn't know who this Dodd-Frank was supposed to be. But I think the situation is, I think John Boehner wants to see the government keep going. Let's get to the key point and you've mentioned my column. Here's the way things work in a democratic legislature. You have an auction, one party, whoever has control, and they adopt legislation. That's where it should be. Now, when a new party comes in, they have the option, if they have the vote, to repeal the legislation. Most of the time, that's not a good idea because if every time one party replaced another party, the second group repealed everything the first group did, it'd be very unstable. You couldn't plan your life. You couldn't plan your business. But it's generally the case that if somebody does something that you think is an outrageous violation of principle and you then get the majority, you can undo it. That's not what's happening here because, yes, a lot of the right-wingers think Obamacare is a terrible violation of human rights. I don't agree. They're entitled to think that. And they were entitled to try to win the presidency in 2012, win the Senate, and repeal it. Their problem is that they didn't win in 2012. They didn't win the Senate. They didn't win the presidency and they actually lost some seats in the House, although they still have control. So here's the illegitimacy of what they're doing. What they're saying is we don't have the votes by the normal constitutional process to change the law. So we will shut down the government. We will tear down something else until you agree to give in to an issue which we don't have the votes for. And now, I, Boehner, I don't think that's a good idea to speak of Boehner. He knows it'll hurt the economy. And he knows it'll hurt the Republican party. And so do a lot of other Republicans. John McCain has been very particular in this. John Boehner, unfortunately, doesn't feel strong enough to defy that right-wing group. And he could bring the Senate bill to the forest speaker who has the power and say, here's the bill the Senate passed. Democrats and Republicans, it would get a majority. But he's intimidated by this right-wing Republican caucus. So I think what's going to happen is this. I think the government's going to shut down. Sadly, I think it'll probably still be shut down by the time people are watching this. And there will be economic damage. The stock market has already been losing because of this. People are not going to be hiring. There will be other problems. I believe what's going to happen is that the public reaction will be very negative towards everybody, but more to the Republicans than not. And at that point, I believe Boehner will go to the Republicans and say, look, you are causing us great political harm. We are getting blamed for this. Then he will be able to go forward and do something. So in other words, I think he knows what he should do and wants to do it, but doesn't have the political strength or courage to do it until there's a disaster for which his party is blamed, and then he will have the leverage to get them to be reasonable. But will his party be blamed? Because I look at the TV and watch the pundits and the news and so forth. And some blame the Republicans for it, but some say, oh, it's just Congress. That's the great intellectual laziness. You know, one of the things I used to hate when I was a student kid in school would be one child would misbehave and the teacher would punish everybody. I mean, that was always the worst, laziest thing. There is certain certainty. I do think in this case, though, it appears to have broken through. I was struck, the Boston Herald, the very conservative Republican paperback, as a conservative Republican paperback, they have an unbroken record of backing losers in every election. I can't remember the last time they endorsed anybody who won. But the other day, they had an editorial cartoon making fun of Senator Ted Cruz, the leading Tea Party guy here, and essentially portraying the general public jumping up and down on the Republican party, portrayed as an elephant, blaming Cruz. Now, even they believe this is hurting them. The Wall Street Journal has been telling them not to do this. Carl Rove has been telling them not to do this. So I think the general sense is some people will blame both sides, but enough people will blame the Republicans so they will feel the heat. A little detour. We talked about Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz. I talked on Saturday with an old friend of mine who will go nameless here for no reason. Otherwise, we don't need to introduce his name in the book. He's a well-known guy and a journalist, one of the better known journalists in America. I said, how can this guy, Cruz, go around saying the things he's saying, highly intelligent guy, very intelligent. At least he's well-educated. He went to the same law school you are to. No, I'm told he's very intelligent. How can a guy do this that's so intelligent? Well, one, intelligence and judgment are not necessarily correlated. I think he has terrible judgment. He also is very ambitious, and I think he has, you know, here's the story with Cruz. People say to him, it's not going to work. You're never going to get ahead this way. But I have encountered this. Ted Cruz was not supposed to be a senator. There's a very previously thought to be very popular Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas named Dohurst, who's very rich. And all the leading Republicans were supporting him for the Senate nomination. And Cruz announced he was running against him. And I believe everybody said to Cruz, you know, you can't win. Look at the whole establishment of Texas is behind this guy, Dohurst. He's won statewide office before, et cetera. And Cruz wins big. And I found, here's the problem. When you have someone who once does something that a lot of people told him she couldn't do, then she thinks she's superwoman. I can do anything. And I think that's what you get with Cruz. Now, how we can, I guess this, I don't think he really believes that there won't be damage. I think he believes that the damage is worth it in two ways. First of all, it will transform the policy. And secondly, it can make him president. Here's the other one. So I'm going on two more. But this is one thing I need to say about both the left and the right. You and I were both strong supporters of Ed Muskie in 1971. And I think if he'd been the nominee, he would have won. And people on all left in our party said, no, they were too angry about Vietnam. And they nominated George McGovern, who lost badly. Now, I voted for George McGovern in November, but it was clear that he was going to lose. And I would say to people, but, you know, I admire McGovern, but he's too far left. No, you don't understand, they would say. And I'm sure you heard this. The great majority of people really agree with us. And that's why people don't vote. And so ideologues on both sides, the right and the left, are convinced that the great mass of non-voters are their people. And if we would only nominate someone who was really ideologically pure, millions of people who've never voted would come out to their side. Our friends thought it was going to do that from a governor in 1972. It didn't happen. This is the Tea Party view, that all these people who don't vote are really their people. And so, well, it looks like it might have a short-term negative effect. Bring them the true religion and you'll win. You think there were any parallels between the Democrats after 1968 and then in the early 70s and now the Republicans? Yes. Yes, I mean, I want to temper it. The left on the Democratic side was rarely as mean as some of these Tea Party people. Although you did have some of the more extreme groups, some of the SDS people were angry and mean, and in some cases violent. But you did have this. This is what joined them, a deep belief in the moral worth of their cause, combined with a view that the public would respond to that, combined with the view that the non-voters will really come with us. And of course, what happened was George McGovern suffered a very bad defeat. And the Democrats learned from that. And the Democrats have not since 1972 gone to that sort of extreme wing of our party to get a nominee. Now, by the way, that's a wing of the party where I often find myself voting. But I think you have to be disciplined to say, you know, look, I represent this part of Massachusetts and I vote this way. I would have this argument when we would be debating gay rights in the Congress. And some of the activists would say, why aren't you getting us this? I said, well, wait a minute, we haven't been able to get that in Massachusetts or New York or Maryland. If we can't get something in Massachusetts and New York or Maryland, how does it become easier when we throw in Mississippi, Utah and Nebraska? And people need to temper their recognition of what the situation is. So what happened was, I think, look at since 1972 that Jimmy Carter and we did have Wally Mondale in 84 who was unfairly portrayed as being that far left. He's been the vice president. But since that time, the Democrats have not gone to that kind of extreme position. Look, there was a danger. And I don't think there's a fair representation of him. But Howard Dean in 2004 was being portrayed as that kind of a standard bearer. I don't think, if you look at Howard Dean's record as governor of Vermont, that bears that out. But the Democrats basically said, no, we don't want to even be in that position. So I think there was that parallel. And I either, if this continues, the country is going to be in terrible trouble. I mean, our system of government doesn't work if people won't accept the outcome. That's essentially what we're saying to the Republicans. Look, the Tea Party, we had elections, you lost the presidency. Who is it? Congressman from Oklahoma, Tom Cole, a very sophisticated Republican, said, how do they expect us to repeal Obamacare when Obama is the president? I mean, it's hard to do things without the president. And so if you can have that position where it's either I get my way or I'll shut the government down, then the government will always be shut down. Because if this succeeds, everybody else will be crazy not to try the same tactic. Well, yeah, let's talk a little bit about Medicare because the things that they're saying about Obamacare now in this fight against Obamacare are the same things they said about Medicare. Even more so. Medicare is even more of a government in the fight program than this. Well, that's the point, Bernie. They said these things about Medicare. And the fact is, Medicare is a real government takeover. This one is about private insurance companies. Well, look, you're right, because this is the Paul Ryan plan. Remember, Paul Ryan, the vice presidential candidate, the budget here did come up with what he called premium support, which meant for people, he said, who are now under 55, you wouldn't have Medicare when they turned 65. They would have the federal government would give them a certain amount of money to go out and buy private insurance. But with no guarantee that that would be enough, with no control over the private insurance we charge. So yes, these are people. I mean, there are no arguments. I think you put this very well. You brought up a very good point. There are no arguments against the president's health care plan that don't apply with even greater force to Medicare. Absolutely. By the way, let me throw in one other thing. It's people say government medicine is always going to be screwed up. In my experience, remember Congress, the single most popular form of medical care, according to the people who received it, was a form of absolute socialized medicine. It's the medical care you get from the Department of Veterans Affairs. If you go into a VA hospital, a government nurse puts you in a government bed, and a government doctor tells her to stick a government needle in your butt. I mean, the VA is totally government. That is socialized medicine. And as you know, this is your generation of people, you talk to some of the older veterans who were in the World War II or Korea, they're ready to fight you if you suggest dismantling the VA. So here, that's true government program. Obamacare is not, but they're after Obamacare now, not Medicare. However, they said the same things about when Medicare in 1965, when they were debating Medicare, it was going to bring down the government. I remember watching a televised debate, Huber Humphrey, Senator Huber Humphrey, and a man who was the head of the AMA. But that's just one reason why I think they're so desperate. Ideologically, it's not that they don't think Obamacare will work. They hate the idea that it might work, because they want to dismantle government. And I think that here is their problem. If Obamacare goes into effect, it won't be possible to make all these scary arguments, because people will see it hasn't happened. One of them has already happened to. When I ran for election 2010, I had the toughest race I'd had in 32 years, and they said, oh, you voted for the health care plan, and it's taking money out of my Medicare. And I said at the time, I'm going to bet you that XC is from now, you won't have seen a nickel lost. Well, I couldn't prove it then. But I would say to people today, three years after the bill was signed, does anybody know anybody who's lost a nickel of Medicare? No. And that's their problem. They're making all these dire predictions, none of which will come true. And so they have to try and get rid of this before reality explodes their myths. So am I being unduly cynical about politicians? If I were in the context of this discussion about what the Republicans said about Medicare, if I were to remind people that in the 2012 presidential campaign, in debates and otherwise, Republicans attacked Obama, accusing him of taking money out of Medicare and putting it somewhere else. How dare you divert any money from Medicare? These are the same people who said Medicare is going to destroy the country. They're going to destroy the country, and who tried under the Ryan plan to do worse. And of course, by the way, it didn't take any money out of Medicare. What it did do was to say that some providers were being paid unduly. And again, I issue that challenge. I do it every time the subject comes up. Would someone please give me an example of any individual who's a Medicare recipient, who's been hurt in any way by the passage of the healthcare bill? And the answer is no. So now some people will say, well, Barney Frank, look, we've got a problem. We've got these big deficits, too much spending, and you liberals are responsible for these deficits. You're the ones who ran up the deficit. And the answer is, of course, no. No event has added more to our deficit in recent years than the Warney Rock. I voted not to go to Warney Rock. That Warney Rock has cost us a trillion dollars, and it'll cost us out on it to the future through the services that we are morally obligated to provide to the veterans whether they were wounded or not. I didn't vote for George Bush's prescription drug plan in expansion of Medicare. I would have voted for it. I've had some changes. One of the things I didn't like was that it did not allow Medicare to bargain with the drug companies for lower drug prices, which the VA can do and which works well for them. I didn't vote for Bush's tax cuts. So I will tell you now that John Boehner, who was in Congress during that period, voted for much more of the debt than I ever did. Again, if we hadn't gone to Warney Rock, if we had done only half of the Bush tax cuts instead of all of them, and we hadn't voted for the prescription drug program, we'd have a few trillion dollars left before we hit the debt. This is one of the great hypocrisies on the part of the Republicans. Military spending alone, we have spent more in the military than on Medicare. Here's one where I actually think the President should change. He's committed to keeping American troops in Afghanistan through the end of 2014. They are brave, they are smart, and they're not doing any good because they're no longer fighting an enemy as much as they are trying to provide a framework in which Afghan society can become democratic and get rid of corruption. I wish that were possible. Maybe it is, but we can't do it. You cannot send the best trained young military people in the world into this kind of a hostile situation and expect them to produce results. So I want to reduce spending. I want to cut military spending by a substantial amount, and I'll give you another area where I want to reduce spending a little more controversial. By the way, we still have troops in Europe. I think that we can now tell Germany and Italy that Stalin is not coming after them, and we can bring our troops home. We still have the full panoply of three ways of dropping thermonuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, which is Russia and anything like what it used to be. I mean, we are overspending. But the American people said, when the President wanted to bomb the Syrians, and I supported him in that one limited thing to say, we're going to punish you for using chemical weapons, you remember American people said, no, we don't want to get involved. Well, in general, they're right, but if we're not going to get involved in all these wars, then there's no reason to spend hundreds of billions of dollars having the capacity to do it. So I believe we can make a very substantial reduction in military spending without any damage to our national security. In fact, we might be better off because we wouldn't be tempted to intervene in ways that are hurtful. You mentioned Syria, and I know you did a column a couple of weeks ago on Syria, and I want you to talk a little bit about how what we see a politician's reversing course. Let's go to Medicare first in 1965, because I was there. I was actually, Barney, at the signing of the Medicare Act in Independence, Missouri. With Harry Truman. With Harry Truman, this program is not about me, it's about you, but I have to say, with Harry Truman, I went the day before. I spent an hour alone with Harry Truman in his office, one of the great experiences of my life. But anyway, about this reversals, they were against Medicare. Conservatives were against Medicare. Now they criticize Obama for trying to divert money, they claim, from Medicare. On Obamacare, the core of it, of course, is the individual mandate. Isn't that a Republican idea? Of course it is. The Heritage Foundation, this hyper-right wing group, came up with it years ago, and it is very much an individual responsibility. And I wanted to do a column, you're anticipating me here, about the individual mandate. Because people have said on the right, well, how dare you make people want biomedical care? What if they don't want medical care? And I'm prepared to make a concession. Here's what I would say. If you are prepared to have tattooed somewhere on your person where it will become clear, that if you were found bleeding and unconscious in the streets, no one is to do anything to help you medically. If, for instance, when the terrible Boston Marathon bombing happened, people who were militantly opposed to having any health care themselves were found laying there by the EMTs and the police and the firefighters, could say, leave me alone. I don't want any medical care. And secondly, if people would sign a contract pledging that if they contracted a contagious disease, they would go off somewhere to a remote island and have no contact with anybody else, then I would say, okay, you don't have to buy medical care. Or sell their house and all their belongings and pay the hospital and the doctors what they rode. Yes, but not have anybody do anything. And what do you do, by the way, if the people are laying there unconscious? I mean, what do you do if you arrive on the scene? So the fact is that in our society, it is virtually impossible for people to enforce that. And by the way, we don't know anybody who does. I've never heard of anyone who said, I've been hurt badly in this accident, but you know, I don't have any health insurance. I don't believe in compulsory health insurance. So you leave me alone. I'll take care of myself. You know what also occurs to me, Barney. In the state of Maine, and in other states, Massachusetts, many states, most states, there's an individual mandate to buy, if you want to operate a motor vehicle, to buy auto insurance. I have to buy auto insurance. How come nobody's complaining about that? Why aren't these people trying to bring down the government over that? I've heard their argument against that. It's a very weak one. They say, well, driving a car is optional. Well, no, it isn't really for many people. If you live in this society, if you want to get to work, if you want to do it, it's not so optional. You can sue the government if they unfairly discriminate against you for not getting your license. What it's saying is this. If you live particularly in a crowded urban society, you're not out in the frontier 20 miles from anybody. If you live in a crowded urban society and you inevitably interact with other human beings, you are going to impose some costs on them, and we have a right to ask you to help bear your share of those costs. That's automobile insurance and that's health insurance. Once again, if you're prepared to tell me that, living in the middle of the city of Portland, you will refuse any medical care that is offered to you in case of an emergency. And that, again, if you get a contagious disease, you immediately leave and go on some uninhabited island somewhere, then you have a right not to pay for anything. But since I don't know anybody's ready to do that, it is the same as automobile insurance. You have an inevitable impact on other people and we have to ask you to make a fair contribution to it. In 1993, when President Clinton and his wife were pushing for some kind of a similar universal insurance, health insurance program, I'm told that the Republicans had a different idea. Their idea was the individual mandate. That was their idea. It was, as you pointed out just a minute ago, Heritage Foundation, and then 22 Republican senators sponsored legislation for the individual mandate. They've done this before, but we've seen it here. You mentioned Syria. We have today, you made a very good point before when people say, oh, it's a plague on both your houses. I want to butt that, I think, conclusively. In 2008, when the Democrats were in control of both houses of Congress, in September, five years ago, just before the presidential election, McCain versus Obama, George Bush sent his secretary of treasury and his appointee, the Federal Reserve, to meet with the Democratic leadership of Congress and said we have a terrible crisis coming. You've got to help us out. They asked us, frankly, to join in passing some legislation called TARP and other things that weren't very popular. You were in the meeting? Absolutely. The answer that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid gave to George Bush was, yes, Mr. President, we'll work together. In that fall of 2008, the Democratic Congress gave full cooperation to the Republican administration, even doing things that we knew would have a short-term negative effect. Then Obama gets elected and he has never gotten from the Republicans remotely the kind of cooperation we gave George Bush. And it's not become pathological. I look, Syria is a great example. In the first place, you had Republicans attacking him, Lindsey Graham, John McCain and others. He's been two weeks. He's got to go in there and get involved in Syria. So he then says, okay, look, I don't want to take on a full Civil War role, but we will punish them militarily if you're using chemical weapons. They turn around and attack him. I mean, Cruz, who had been criticizing Obama for not doing anything in Syria, then criticizes him for doing something in Syria. And he had the media to this. For many years, a lot of people have believed, and the media has generally been supportive, that it's a mistake for President of the United States to go to war on his own. We had the War Powers Act to try and stop that from happening. People have said, you know, Constitution says, power to declare war is Congress. It's not a good idea when you're talking about something as serious as sending our troops in a battle for the President to do it unilaterally. So Barack Obama correctly says, look, we're not acting on self-defense, but I think it's good policy to bomb Syria. I asked Congress to authorize it. People started attacking him for doing what people had been yelling at the President for not doing. And I said, quote my column, there was an old saying in the Middle Ages, the king can do no wrong, which was meant that if something wrong happened, please attribute it to somebody else, they wanted to preserve the notion that the king was infallible. And I said, they adapted that. The President can do no right. Obama and the Syria thing, he had people criticizing him for not doing anything militarily and then for planning to do something militarily. Same people. Yes, for being unilateralists as the President and then for asking Congress. There's a pathological insistence on being critical of Obama or whatever happens. So you said in that column in Syria, there is a significant body of Republicans prepared to attack Obama for any decision he makes. I think even Republicans, some moderate Republicans would agree with that. Yeah, they do. They attack him for everything. Why is that? I don't know. What you have are some people who are very, very rooted in that sort of conservative set of principles. And I think some of them are furious. They see the country slipping away from them. Take the example of the same-sex marriage. I mean, the fact is that this country appears now, in my judgment, obviously very correctly, to be basically saying, you know what, someone's sexual orientation is. This is our own business. We're out of that business. There's a national consensus, an international consensus, that we have to do something about what we put into the air because of the negative impact on the climate. These people see the country slipping away from them. And Obama is a symbol of that. And the fact that he's black plays into it. It's not necessarily that they're racist. It's just, my God, whoever thought we could wake up and see a black man. And I remember seeing, back in 2008, these signs saying, Barack Hussein Obama, you must be bleeping and kidding me. I mean, he is a symbol to them of their loss of control, of the loss of a control in which they ran the country. And that's where they get upset about immigration. They get upset about LGBT rights, about, well, we got to get to, you know, look, when we were younger, what was the ideal, the fastest, most powerful car you could get? I mean, the notion that you had to worry about miles per gallon or that was, oh, unpatriotic. So I think he becomes the focal point at their resentment of the loss of control. In all your years in Congress, and you were in Congress at the end of the, well, at the Reagan administration, both Bushes, Clinton, and now Obama, anything close to this in your experience as Congress, of this reaction to Obama? No, I'm writing a book now, it's probably a memoir, probably a political tract. And I say, Tip O'Neill in 1981, he's Speaker of the House, and some people said, well, Reagan has this program for cutting government, cutting taxes, you know, bottled up. He said, no, that's not good for democracy. I'm going to vote against it. I'm going to urge other people to vote against it. But the President of the United States, he just kind of like said, we're going to put that legislation on the floor and see what happens now over our objection. It passed, but I think it was a lot healthier. It has never been this degree of determined partisan opposition, not just to disagree with the President, but to destroy him, even if it does damage to the country that I've ever seen. I mean, you probably have to go back, I'm not a total historian, but I would think you'd have to go back to the Republican opposition to Andrew Johnson at Lincoln, which killed, because they thought correctly, in my view, that he was trying to let the South, the Southern whites, almost be opposed slavery. But again, you know, within a few years, people said, what happened to my partisanship? It's very simple, but Obama got elected. In 2008, I urge people to go back at that. Let me give them an assignment. There's a movie out now on Netflix called Hank. It's about Hank Paulson, who was the Secretary of Treasury, and how he had to navigate through the fiscal crisis of 2008. And they will see a lesson in bipartisanship. I mean, I know he's told me that he's in there and speaking well of me and I have him. So you could not get a greater contrast between the way the Democrats responded to Bush. Let's put it this way. A crisis was about to hit America with the collapse of our economy in 2008, and Bush went to the Democrats and said, would you help me do some very unpopular things to stave it off? And we said, of course we will. Today, you have the reverse. The right wing is not only not trying to help stave off a crisis, they're trying to create one that will do serious damage to the economy, and they are doing that in part to inflict, they think, the pain on the President. So things have changed enormously in this country. You're up close from 1981 on in Congress, enormous changes in Washington. Right, and now I think I'm hoping one or two things happen. Either the public says to the Republican Party, look, I have voted for a lot of Republicans, but you're in the hands of crazy people. I mean, this is not the way, our government can't work this way, so that the Republicans, I think it is possible they will lose control of the House next year, even with the Gary Manning districts. Ironically, the ones in the, some of the ones who are the most for Calcitrant will survive because of their districts, but there are plenty of Republicans in districts that could go the other way if there's a repudiation and that could happen. Or, and this is what I would rather see than have us go through all this, the more reasonable conservatives will gain control. And I'm not talking about Jake Javis, I'm not talking about Olympia Snow, I'm talking about Bob Dole type of Republicans. They're the ones who need to take back the party. And I'm hoping that we don't have to have a lot of pain. I mean, what I think is like this, I must say, is my prediction. These, they're intransigent will put the country through a lot of pain. They will get blamed for that, and then they will decide that they can't keep it going. That's not a price we should have to pay. I have people say to me, Obama, he's not LBJ. No, he's not. He's not LBJ. LBJ would have been able to reach out to these people and make a deal with the Republicans. I think the world has changed. Absolutely. They're wrong about that. I mean, and the Tea Party is not ever doxing. They just don't understand it. And maybe the president could do a little more schmoozing. I don't think that would have much effect with them. These are people who are ideologically driven. And no, I don't think any president would be able to do that. Well, let's go back a step. If their own speaker of the House can't make them be reasonable, how can you expect the president of the opposite party to do it? Good point. Did you go to the play all the way in Cambridge, the play about Lyndon Johnson? No, I just read about it, starring the guy from Breaking Bad, apparently. Right, right. Yeah. But it's all about how Johnson's got things done. I couldn't get a ticket. If I was a big shot like you, I'd be able to get a ticket. Well, I'll tell you what I did do, what I have done about Johnson. I've read two books of my life, which I read as manuals for how to behave. One was a biography of Adam Clayton Powell, who was the third African American to be elected to the House in the post civil war. Wait a minute. You read Adam Clayton Powell's biography on how to behave? On how to behave early on as someone breaking a discrimination set of barriers. He was the first black man to say, when he got to Congress in 1943, he was told he couldn't use the house swimming pool. He couldn't go to the house barbershop and he couldn't eat in the house restaurant. And his two predecessors had a bite about it. He said, the hell I can't. And he did it. And when I became the first voluntarily openly gay member of Congress, I followed some of that, which was not to do things just to make a point, but not to refuse to do it. So somebody else makes a point. But the other one I read, I was on a trip to Cape Bird, which is an area where a lot of people in the district I used to represent come from. From the New Bedford people. New Bedford and William. And I was doing a lot of reading on a trip like that. And I read Robert K. Rose, one of his volumes of his biography. And I read the chapter about Johnson as minority leader. When he was minority leader, he had like 46 or 47 Democrats. I had about 35 Democrats. I learned by reading about Johnson's technique. So, yes, he was very good at it, but there were limits to what he knew. And by the way, and people forget this, let's put it this way, Johnson was excellent at getting the most that could be gotten in a given political context. But he couldn't change the political context. So Lyndon Johnson, 63, 64, honored to 65, great legislative achievements. But by 66, when the country was in this bitter mood over Vietnam, no, you do not see any great accomplishments by Johnson after the 1965, 66, 67, 68, there was too much anger. So the kind of personal skills he had were useless. And so there is not a really good comparison between the present 2013 and 1964 and 65. There's comparison between 1967 and 68. Right. Okay. Let's turn to a couple of other things. Dodd Frank. I saw in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, an editorial said that Dodd Frank and the regulations that are being drafted to implement all of the details of Dodd Frank are killing the big banks. It says the big banks said the editorial are under siege by the government, because they weren't under siege before you passed the bill. Well, I'd say a couple things about it. First of all, because the Wall Street Journal was chewing them on, but they were doing one of the bad stuff. Secondly, one of the first things the Wall Street Journal attacked me for when I became chairman was outlawing the kind of loans that were given to people who shouldn't have gotten loans, who couldn't pay them back and went bad and hurt everybody, the subprime loans. The Wall Street Journal had an editorial in December of 2007 about how wonderful they were. The other thing I'd say, by the way, is if the banks were under siege, how come they are still paying the top people so much money? I mean, do you think David Crockett got a bonus at the Alamo? Now, they were under siege at the Alamo, but I don't remember that Crockett or Jim Bowie were giving themselves bonuses. I mean, for a group of institutions that claim they're under siege, they're living pretty good. In my experience with most business people, you know, my father's small businessman, my husband has a small business, my father-in-law does. When things are tough, they don't increase their home pay. They don't pay themselves more. The fact is, this is just nonsense. In the first place, the banks have been doing well until the, they were starting to recover and the stocks would, until the Republicans began to scare the stock market this way. And what we are preventing them from doing are the things they never should have done in the first place. The JPMorgan Chase is under siege, or what are they under siege for? For losing $6 billion by engaging in derivatives manipulations in London that they lost control over for selling mortgages that were defective. They haven't, let's put it this way. I ask the Wall Street General and everybody else, give me one specific regulation that you think goes too far, and maybe I'll agree with you. But this general notion that we should leave the poor banks alone so they can repeat the performance that got us in a big trouble doesn't persuade me. Well, if you're oppressed, you get a lot of sympathy. And I think the idea here is that the big banks, the real big ones, not the little banks here in Maine, the big banks, the international banks, are being oppressed by you, your law and the regulators and the Democrats. And of course they said they then, I guess that's why they have to pay themselves millions and millions of dollars a year is to relieve their oppression. We have basically told them to stop doing things they never should have done in the first place and I again, and by the way, it was not just the Democrats that did this. We worked in 2008 with a group of bank regulators who were Bush appointees. Remember, the way we regulate financial institutions is we try not to make it partisan. So for example, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, he was appointed three times to high office by George W. Bush. He was chairman of his council of economic advisors, then a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and then the chairman. He's a major player with all these regulations. One of the toughest regulators we've had was a woman named Sheila Baer, who was a Bush appointee, a former Bob Dole employee who was the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Hank Paulson, Bush's Secretary of Treasury, will tell you that he takes credit legitimately for many of the things we have put in the bill. So the Wall Street Journal is kind of the Tea Party of American media. They were a little bit more dressed up in some aspects, but they were just as extreme. They're okay off the editorial page. Oh, that's exactly right. They still have a pretty good newspaper that's fairly straightforward, but the editorial page is a little bit. I will tell you, in 2007, I asked people to go back and look for this. In December of 2007, the Wall Street Journal attacked us for trying to stop bad mortgage loans after claiming that the Democrats were behind it all and said that most subpoimones were a good thing and leave it to the market. But what about that? That's what people understand is the Democrats had this idea that everybody in America, no matter who, was entitled on their own home. No, at first place, that was true. Both the Clinton and Bush administration pushed home ownership. Bush did it as well. For instance, in 2004, George W. Bush ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase the percentage of mortgages they bought from people below the median income. I criticized that. I said that was not a good thing. Yes, Democrats wanted to help working class and middle class people buy homes, but we also were trying to prevent home mortgages from being given to poor people because it was going to hurt them as well as the economy. And in fact, in 2004 and 2005, when the Republicans were in control, again, that's what people forget, Republicans controlled the Congress from 1995 to 2007. So that was them. They were the ones who controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They were the ones who controlled all the banking laws. We did try in 2004 and 2005 to get a bill passed to restrict subprime loans. The Republican leadership said no. In 2007, when I became the chairman, we did restrict subprime loans and the Wall Street Journal attacked us, and most Republicans voted against it. Yeah, that's interesting because you're a poster boy for all of this. I want to write about this. I now have something in common with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Dick Cheney has lied about both of us. I opened up Dick Cheney's autobiography, and I did what's called the Washington Read. I turned to the index to look for my name, and I see a reference to me, and it says I was astounded just a month ago. In 2003, Cheney writes, we submitted legislation to Congress to control Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, killed it. I was not the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee in 2003. I was in the minority. I became the chairman in 2007, at which point we did pass that legislation. So here's Cheney claiming falsely, dishonestly, knowing better. A lie. Yeah, lying that I was the chairman who killed the bill when it was the Republicans who killed the bill. I agree they've gotten away with that. You know part of this House, people tend to think of the Democrats as the party in power, as the party that governs, even when we've been in the minority. So from 1995 to 2007, the Republicans controlled and didn't do anything. It's in 2007 that we passed the legislation that cleaned up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and banned subprime loans, and then went after the other regulations. So they also say that it was the Democrats, as well as Republicans to be fair, that called for and got the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which separated the businesses of these banks. You couldn't take the ordinary guy like me's deposit dollars and then invest them in derivatives in the old days. Now they could because you guys repealed it. Well, two things. One, I voted against the repeal. You did? I voted against repeal of Glass-Steagall. I did agree that those regulations were something outdated, but I wanted new regulations in their place. So I voted against it. But I will say this, even as Bill Clinton was saying, my senator, whom I greatly admire, Elizabeth Warren, who wants to be a state Glass-Steagall acknowledges that Glass-Steagall repeal had nothing to do with the crash. Here's the problem. Lehman Brothers and AIG were the two institutions that precipitated the crash. Neither one of them were affected by Glass-Steagall. They weren't banks that were in the investment business. They were in other business here. So, and secondly, I would say this with the point about putting deposit money at risk. We did address that in the financial reform bill. And it's something called the Volcker rule, which people are going to see adopted in pretty good form within a few months. And that rule says if you are a bank and you have insured deposits, you may not engage in derivative transactions purely to make money on your own. If a customer says to you, I want you, as my money manager, to do it, you can do it. But that's with the customer's money, not with depositor funds. And the bank's own capital on depositor funds will no longer be at risk in derivative trading after this rule, which I expect in a couple of months. And as a depositor, if I don't want my money invested in derivatives, it won't be. It won't be. By the way, as a depositor, you are now insured. That's one of the things we did to help the small banks. The deposit insurance cap had been $100,000 per person. And in the financial reform bill at the request of the community banks, we raised it to $250,000 per person so that you can now have a married couple can have up to half a million dollars in the smallest possible bank with total security. That is 100% guaranteed by the federal government, no matter how badly the bank screws up. Barney, one thing related to Glass-Steagall, I watched on public television John Reed, former chairman of the board of Citicorp, go on TV, was interviewed by Bill Moyers, and say, I lobbied hard for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and I'm sorry I did, and I apologize. Well, there were arguments for putting it back in. I don't think it would make much difference, to be honest. The argument is that the banks have gotten too big. But again, no one, there's no, even an argument that the repeal of Glass-Steagall contributed to the crisis, derivatives were the problem. But the derivative activity or the, well, two things. The worst thing was mortgages being made that shouldn't have been made. But a lot of banks made those. I mean, that was, the fundamental problem was that they made mortgages that shouldn't have been made, and they bundled them up and sold them, and everybody got in over their heads. But all of the, I guess the best way to do it is this. None of the practices that led to this crisis would have been outlawed if Glass-Steagall had still been in effect. AIG, an insurance company that was selling derivatives, unaffected by Glass-Steagall. Lehman Brothers, an investment house, unaffected by Glass-Steagall. On the other side, banks, like countrywide, that made lousy loans. Glass-Steagall said banks could only make loans. It did nothing to just say they had to be good ones. So we just got a couple of minutes left here. I want to wrap this up, and I'm hoping, you don't have to commit now, but I'm hoping you come back again one of these days, because this has been great. I've enjoyed it. I would be glad to. I am. I guess, I know Shelley Pingby was kind of slated here, but Shelley's, I got to know from there that they help. I am being held prisoner by the Tea Party in Washington, D.C., but Shelley's a great congresswoman. I'm delighted my husband is to be represented by her. I still vote in Massachusetts, so I'll come back. And she's a good friend of yours. And I will be great to come back on my own. Shelley, I always thought she'd be real. She declined to run for the Senate when Angus King got in. But I told Shelley, I think she's better off in the house. She can become a real player in the house. She's very well positioned. You know, she's on the Appropriations Committee, which is a great honor. And she deals with agriculture and she deals with the national parks and the interior and energy. Shelley, well, you know, she's been a great leader in agriculture and in organic and other kinds of agriculture. She's very well positioned and delivers well for the state. So you live part-time in Maine. You're here a few days each week. Well, this year, because I'm writing a book, I'm here more often than not. But starting, I still have my apartment in Newton. Next year, I'm going to have one in Cambridge, and I hope to teach in Cambridge. Teach at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School. But so I'm back and forth now, and I do some traveling, actually. Part of it is, I make money by giving speeches. This is the longest I've talked for nothing in a long time now. I was going to say, I owe you a lot. I was talking for nothing. I said to somebody the other day, you know, a year ago, I would have told you that you couldn't pay me enough to sit and have a nice chat with Kar-Wove. But it turns out you can. Okay. Now, let me ask you, let me ask you one final off, off of, apart from everything, are you for the two-state solution in the Middle East? Of course. But how is it going to happen, and we have now about a minute and a half, how is it going to happen if everyday settlements in the West Bank get bigger and there more of them? I think the settlements are a great mistake and they're not in Israel's own interest. On the other hand, you have this problem, because I believe twice now, the Palestinians were offered very fair settlements, very fair agreements, and turned them down. And so you have this frustration on both sides. But I do believe that the Israelis have very legitimate security needs, and the 67 borders by themselves would have to be altered some. But I do believe that the settlement policy is not in Israel's best interest, or in the interest of peace. We had on this show about a month ago, about four months ago, Jeremy Ben-Ami, who is the head of J Street. And he was up in Boston, he came up and did the show with. Barney, it's been a real pleasure. It's been fun. And you said a few funny things. I wanted you to say more funny things, but maybe next time you say more funny things. I'm going to say a few. Okay. Thanks very much. We'll be here to sit here for a minute.