Whenever people are being intellectually dishonest in debate, it is an implicit concession they have lost the fight
BARNEY FRANKIf people knew of ethics violations, they should have sent them to the Ethics Committee. If you think there was serious ethics violation that ought to be looked at, you don’t hold it back for retaliatory purposes.
More Barney Frank Quotes
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Serving in Congress is like having a second shot at high school.
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Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there’s no hierarchy.
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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.
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The Moral Majority supports legislators who oppose abortions but also oppose child nutrition and day care. From their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth.
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Today, many people take for granted the notion that people whose lives are going to be very heavily affected by public policies should have a say in how they are formulated and carried out.
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The issue is not that morals be applied to public policy, it’s that conservatives bring public policy to spheres of our lives where it should not enter.
BARNEY FRANK -
These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis.
BARNEY FRANK -
Most people who are activists and are concerned about issues get their information from sources which reinforce their opinions and give them the facts that they want to hear.
BARNEY FRANK -
I hope we will not so characterize religious people as being so narrow and so biased towards people not of their own religion that they cannot even work with them in this common cause to which you say they are committed.
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It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.
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Donald Trump has done more for getting people to understand the importance of public policy that respond to public needs in an affirmative way than anything we could have done on our own.
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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.
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In a free society, a large degree of human activity is none of the government’s business. We should make criminal what’s going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.
BARNEY FRANK -
I wouldn’t want [gay marriage] to go to the United States Supreme Court now because that homophobe Antonin Scalia has too many votes on this current court.
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But when others suggested that the poor should not simply be the objects of these programs but also the subjects – that they should be actively involved in shaping the programs, making decisions about how to spend the money etc. – some of the previous supporters reconsidered.
BARNEY FRANK