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Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there’s no hierarchy.

Barney Frank

For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.
BARNEY FRANK

Effort People Programs Welfare
Regarding homophobia in general, the good news is that there is a lot less of it than there used to be. The bad news is that it ever existed in the first place, and the worse news is that it remains far stronger than is healthy for a society dedicated in theory to equality under the law.
BARNEY FRANK

Diversity Equality Under Justice Law
This bill is the legislative equivalent of crack. It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system and it’s expensive to boot.
BARNEY FRANK

Doe Long Yield
The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.
BARNEY FRANK

Country Stupidity War
Martin Luther King said, and it is sadly still true, that one of the most segregated times in America is the hour of worship.
BARNEY FRANK

Country Kings Worship
But here too it should be noted that the President’s approach was to first ask the repressive and brutal Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden to us, and only after that government refused to do that did we invade.
BARNEY FRANK

Firsts Government President
The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left’s on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.
BARNEY FRANK

Ambition Essentials Reality
In America, unlike England, unlike Israel, unlike Japan, other democracies, we have elections that have staggered terms.
BARNEY FRANK

Country Democrats Staggered
Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.
BARNEY FRANK

Country Decision Receiving
The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.
BARNEY FRANK

Gay Rights Writing
It seems to me that politicians ought to use the same words as other people.
BARNEY FRANK

People Politician Use
When I was here there was still a requirement that students had to swim 50 yards to graduate…because Harry Elkins Widener had drowned with the sinking of the Titanic. And it made me very grateful at the time that he had not gone down in a plane crash.
BARNEY FRANK

Funny Graduation Grateful Swim
Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn’t have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.
BARNEY FRANK

Party People Political
Conservatives believe that from the standpoint of the federal government, life begins at conception and ends at birth.
BARNEY FRANK

Believe Birth Government
For most of my life, I have eaten to deal with stress.
BARNEY FRANK

Dealing Eaten Life Stress
We all have the right to call each other names. Rudeness is a deeply held constitutional value.
BARNEY FRANK

Name Rudeness Values

Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there’s no hierarchy.

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Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there’s no hierarchy.

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