Barney Frank

I seek no quid pro quo, so I do not think it is harassment because I am not the gentleman's supervisor. I would say to the gentleman that I appreciate his talking about the relevance of respecting the wishes of millions of California…

Of course there is a difference, and this is a very profound and very clear difference. There is a difference between the day-to-day decisions that government makes and the question about what the basic rules will be. Of course the…

And on the other hand you have an insistence on attachment to unyielding, undeviating fealty to the notion of bureaucratic perfection. That is hardly worth inflicting this degree of inconvenience on so many decent Americans and their…

Put that doctrine in the hands of the Chinese or others overseas and you say to them, okay, as long as something was once paid for in America, this book, this movie, this recording, this CD, then I can sell it without paying the owner, and…

What we are saying is, if one earns money in part by playing music, then one should share some of that with the people whose music one is playing. This notion that there should only be one source of revenue for each program does not…

On this question about whether or not this is a compromise, and the gentleman has mentioned our late colleague Sonny Bono who worked so hard for this, he frankly thought this went much too far. He wrote a letter to the Registrar of…

I would ask the ranking minority member, has there been any conversation on the part of any member of the majority, from the Committee on the Judiciary or elsewhere, with the gentleman dealing with how we might respond to Independent…

I know as the second ranking minority member that neither he, I, nor any other Members have been consulted. We have read a lot in the paper about what the Committee on the Judiciary was going to do, what it would not be allowed to do, how…

Is there any coincidence to the fact that the gentleman is not running again that he brings up the pay raise?

Let me say to Members who may think that this is not at a high level, that is where we started. This is about nothing. This is a political game. This is the Model U.N., about nothing. It is wasting time and money.

I am against the rule because if we defeated the rule, we would save time, not vote on the useless resolution, and be a few thousand bucks ahead.

I must say, of the large number of people I have gotten to meet, of all of them, Sonny was probably the hardest guy to be unhappy in his presence. There was about him a determination to seek out the most cheerful and the most upbeat in any…

I would simply differ when he said why did I not talk about our decision to pick certain people to offer these resolutions. I must tell the gentleman people do not pick people on this side. When the women or members of the Hispanic Caucus…

I seriously appreciate having the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary give this testimony to the important role of Federal district judges. We have heard too little of that. While I disagree with him on the specific bill, I am glad…

Yes, Mr. Speaker, it was a subpoena that came from the former Member, Mr. Dornan, as opposed to one solemnly voted by the House in the course of an investigation. But the argument that it was not authorized by a district court, no, under…

Mr. Chairman, the failed premise of that last comment is that if we ask members of board of directors to do 8 hours of community service, they will reject the loan. I reject that. People who serve on the board of directors have a…

Let me say the gentleman noted that the defense budget had gone up to 385, as I understand it, which I thought was too high then, but he said we have cut it $100 billion. That is what; about a 30-percent cut? I would ask the gentleman from…

I have been persuaded that disciplinary action might well be appropriate. What I worry about is, given constitutional doctrines that apply, if we get too explicit in legislation directing the administration to take either law enforcement…

I would hope that we would stop telling people what they have to wear when they swim and we would not try to repudiate the roundness of the Earth and that we would also refrain from intervening in the selection of individual research…

I disagree with the criticism. I think the role of the judiciary in defending our rights, particularly when legislative majorities err and disregard those rights, is a very important one. I am, therefore, pleased to note that there are…

The argument that we have heard from Republicans, from the Speaker, and others that, ``Oh, you shouldn't give the tax credit to these people who don't pay any taxes,'' they forget to say income taxes or capital gains taxes, that is true…

Mr. Speaker, the desecration of graves is a particularly despicable act. It clearly bespeaks simply malice. No one can ever claim any necessity. No one can ever claim to be driven by circumstances to do so vicious a thing. The harm it does…

This does not legislate a cut in the CPI, but it assumes one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been under a lot of pressure, and this budget assumes that the CPI will be downgraded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics so that elderly people…

The gentleman from Florida finally addresses the point I was making, as opposed to a point I never made. What he is acknowledging, of course, is that this grandfathering, et cetera, that he is talking about, it is a substantial repeal of…

This notion of a work disincentive, given the existence of the welfare bill, would cut you off just comes out of thin air. The notion that people quit jobs or refuse to get jobs because they might get a section 8 when they would have no…