Former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, Architect of Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Law and First Sitting Congressman to Voluntarily Come Out as Gay, Dies of Congestive Heart Failure at 86

OGUNQUIT, Maine — Former Rep. Barney Frank, the rapier-witted Massachusetts Democrat whose name was affixed to the most sweeping rewrite of American financial regulation since the Great Depression and who in 1987 became the first sitting member of Congress to voluntarily declare himself gay, died Tuesday night at his summer home in Ogunquit. He was 86. The cause was congestive heart failure, his husband, James Ready, told The Boston Globe. Frank had entered hospice care earlier this month.

"Essentially, after 86 years, my heart's just wearing out," Frank told CNN's Jake Tapper in an interview taped two weeks ago that aired Tuesday evening on "The Lead." Frank served 16 terms representing Massachusetts's 4th Congressional District from 1981 until his retirement in 2013. As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the 2008 financial crisis, he co-authored the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act with then-Senate Banking Chairman Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn. The 848-page law, signed by President Barack Obama at the Ronald Reagan Building on July 21, 2010, imposed sweeping new capital requirements on the nation's largest banks, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, established the Financial Stability Oversight Council and required derivatives to clear through central counterparties for the first time. Portions were rolled back during Trump's first term in 2018.

Frank's coming-out interview with the Globe in May 1987, at a moment when no other sitting member of Congress had publicly acknowledged being gay, made him an instantly polarizing national figure. In 2012 he became the first congressperson to enter into a same-sex marriage, wedding Ready in Newton, Mass., in a ceremony officiated by then-Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Their union came three years before the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Known on Capitol Hill for a stream of acid one-liners delivered through a thick Bayonne, N.J. accent — he once told a town hall heckler comparing Obama to Hitler that arguing with her was "like having a conversation with a dining room table" — Frank was unsparing in his criticism of the contemporary American left even in his final weeks. His forthcoming book, "The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy," scheduled for September 15 release from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, argues that Democratic infighting and overreach on identity politics handed Donald Trump a second term.

Tributes poured in from across the political spectrum. Former President Obama called Frank "the kind of legislator who could turn any committee hearing into both a master class and a comedy show." Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who helped Frank design the CFPB, said in a statement, "There is not a single American family with a credit card or a mortgage who is not safer because of Barney Frank." Even House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., a fierce Dodd-Frank critic, called Frank "one of the great parliamentary minds of his generation." Frank is survived by Ready, his sister, the political analyst Ann F. Lewis, and his brother, the criminal-defense attorney David Frank.