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STATEMENT OF CONGRESSMAN FRANK ON HIS
AVAILABILITY FOR MEETINGS
This is an apology for the fact that I am
able to accept far fewer requests for meetings and speeches
than I have done throughout most of my career, and an
explanation of why this is the case.
I became Chairman of the Committee on
Financial Services in January, 2007. The committee has a very wide
jurisdiction, and it is the second largest committee in the
Congress – there are seventy members. This means that as
Chairman, I am involved in a broad range of subject matters
that come before the committee, and my time for non-committee
business has become shorter. This is true because of the need
for me to be available to the sixty-nine other members of the
committee, to the regulators and other public officials whose
work we supervise, and to people with particular interest in
and knowledge about the subjects we cover. Formal committee
meetings alone have become very time consuming – sessions when
the committee votes on bills and hearings take far more time
in a committee of seventy than they do in a committee of
twenty-five or thirty-five.
I am also much more involved in
conversations with members of the House leadership, involving
scheduling, legislative matters, etc. Taken together, the
need for me to do all of these things well – at least as well
as I can – substantially diminishes the time I have for many
other types of meetings. I apologize for the fact that I am
not able to be as available as I used to be.
Within Massachusetts, I have had to focus
more nearly exclusively on my own Congressional district,
because the people who live in that district have a primary
claim on my time and attention. It also means that because of
the time I must spend in Washington meeting with colleagues of
various sorts, I am not as free as I used to be to make
appointments in Washington. I have worked with my schedulers
so that there are days on a fairly regular basis when I am
available for meetings in Massachusetts. I will be asking
most people who work or live in the state, and who have
business with me, to meet with me in Massachusetts rather than
in Washington. In Washington, I am at the beck and call House
floor votes, my legislative colleagues, the Democratic
leadership, etc. In Massachusetts, on the other hand, I am
generally answerable to no one other than my constituents –
which is why I prefer to maximize meeting time there.
I have a very able staff of legislative
assistants both on my personal office staff and on the
committee who are available to meet with people in Washington
to discuss substance, and in many cases the best way to
proceed is for people to talk to staff members in Washington
and then with me in Massachusetts – and of course the sequence
could be me first and then the staff.
I am of course very pleased to be
chairman of the Financial Services Committee, and I think if
offers important opportunities for me to affect public policy
in ways that I have long cared about. But an opportunity cost
of my being able to do this – and to do it as well as I hope –
is a diminution of the time I have available for other
things. I regret this, and I did want at the very least to
fully explain it to people with whom I may not be able to
meet, or whom I will have to meet with in circumstances other
than those they would most prefer.
BARNEY FRANK
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