Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., will be remembered in retirement as a Democratic Gingrich but with only half Newt’s charm. The brainy and insufferably arrogant former chairman and current ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee is best known for his blustery, partisan, and plain wrong insistence for years before the collapse of the housing bubble that there were no problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Another memorable moment of Frank’s career will be the interminable and extremely ungracious victory speech he gave after his unexpectedly close 2010 re-election: “The collective campaigns that were run by most Republicans were beneath the dignity of a democracy,” he declared. He was frequently wrong and never in doubt, but, Mark Twain’s “native criminal class” aphorism notwithstanding, Frank was not a crook. He understood the vicissitudes of the nexus between big government and big business. When one of his aides on the Financial Services Committee quit in 2010 to take a job lobbying for the financial industry, he took the highly unusual step of criticizing him in public and ordering the rest of his staff to cut off all contact. It was an act for which we praised him at the time, and an example that we encouraged Republicans to follow.
With Frank’s retirement, the next in line to be ranking Democrat on House Financial Services (or chairman if Democrats retake the House in 2012) is Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who remains the subject of a never-ending, unresolved House Ethics Committee investigation. She has been credibly accused of using her congressional position in 2008 to intervene on behalf of a bank seeking a bailout — OneUnited Bank. It just happened that her husband was heavily invested in OneUnited Bank. The bank’s finances were shoddy, its officers were justifiably criticized for using corporate accounts to buy sports cars and beachfront mansions, and the officers reportedly misrepresented their intentions in gaining a September 2008 meeting with Treasury officials. What’s more, Waters allegedly failed to disclose her personal ties to OneUnited when she arranged the meeting, Treasury officials learned of them only later.
When accused, Waters’ first reaction was to play the race card. She even dispatched staffers to protest her innocence by picketing a speech by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “It ain’t about Nancy,” she said at the time. “It’s about black people.” It is bad enough that members of the committee can expect to get a disproportionate amount of their campaign money from the industry they oversee. But the Financial Services Committee should not be available to a congresswoman who appears to have pulled government strings in an effort to enrich herself. Waters is already lobbying the House Democratic leadership to succeed Frank as the ranking minority member on the committee. After the 2012 election, either Pelosi or a new House Democratic leader will face the easiest choice of his or her political career. That choice ought to be to tell Waters to forget about it.
