Saturday, March 07, 2009

Frank To Jail. Now. Period.

Oversight: Congressman Barney Frank says he wants some of those responsible for our current financial meltdown to be prosecuted. And we couldn't agree more. First up in the court dock: Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.

Even by the extraordinarily loose standards of Congress, it takes some chutzpah for someone such as Frank to suggest that he'll seek prosecutions for those behind the housing and financial crunch and for what he called "a strongly empowered systemic risk regulator."

It's hard to say why Frank did all this. It could be his close ties to the Neighborhood Assistance Corp., a powerful housing activist group based in Boston, which controls billions in loans. Or that he received some $40,100 in campaign donations from Fannie and Freddie from 1989 to 2008. Or that he has been romantically linked to a one-time executive at Fannie during the 1990s.

If you're looking for a culprit in the meltdown to prosecute, no one fits the bill better than Frank.
I have a friend who argues that the only way to clean up Congress is to make it automatic that with election to a term, you are automatically signed up for an equal length prison term to be served immediately afterward. If you want another term you have to wait to get out of prison before you can run again.

Frank is the poster boy who will put a constitutional amendment to enforce this obviously needed rule over the top very soon now...