"A few brave souls such as [Representative] Debbie Wasserman and Barney Frank had the courage to point out the obvious - that Congress is not the place for a medical diagnosis and that the constitutional separation of powers is serious business…"
(Using Terri, by Jon B. Eisenberg, 2005, HarperCollins)

"By late Sunday, when the debate had reached the House of Representatives, Barney Frank stood almost alone in opposing the bill. Cliches suffered. Here was an openly gay Democrat, the Massachusetts liberal of all Massachusetts liberals, defending the Founding Fathers, federalism, and the American tradition of keeping the government,s nose of out a family,s business."

"The caption tonight ought to be 'We are not doctors. We just play them on C-SPAN.'" Click here to read full text of Frank's remarks.

Frank led the Democratic charge against a measure seeking federal intervention as the House met in an extraordinary late-night session Sunday, lacing his criticism with biting sarcasm: "We,re not doctors, we just play them on C-Span."

"They are fanatics with a very extreme agenda, and they will accept no restrictions on how to seek it. People who think they are doing the work of the Lord are sometimes less willing to accept earthly restraints."

"I think it will be seen at some point as a turning point in America about what,s going on with the Republican Party - namely that you have this fanatical party willing to impose its own views on pople, and frankly, powerful enough to do it…This is particularly a problem for Dr. Frist. This is a direct refutation of his TV diagnosis." Click Here to read additional comments by Congressman Frank following Terri Schiavo,s death.

"This needed to be debated so people in the country knew what the issues were, knew the implications of what we were doing," Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who led the Democratic House fight against the [Schiavo] measure, said in a phone interview. "This was a constitutional crisis."

Democratic Representative Barney Frank countered that intervention by Congress in the Schiavo case undercuts Republican arguments that activist judges are overstepping their boundaries. "This is a federal judge instructed by Congress to ignore everything that,s gone on in the state," Frank said. "It,s the Republicans who are trying to command judicial activism and dictate outcomes when they don,t like rulings."

'This is what,s troubling to me: Not whether we should review the general subject about how we treat people who are disabled -- I think we should do that - but that because members of Congress in the majority, for a variety of reasons - religious, sincere, political - disagreed with the result that the Florida courts had reached after years of litigation, they said to the federal court, Disregard the Florida courts.

De novo means you make believe the Florida courts never happened. And that is something that is not something we,ve ever done or should do."

"That,s not a judgment I feel competent to make, Larry. I think you should make that judgment only after knowing a great deal more about several specifics. What was her intention? That,s contested. It,s been tried and argued about in the Florida courts. The courts found that on the balance they thought her intention was expressed that she wouldn,t have wanted to live in this situation. I don,t know. I,m not in the court system.

"I know that it was thoroughly litigated up and down the Florida courts, up to the Florida Supreme Court on a number of occasions. The question is, is there any hope of recovery? Is she having any feeling? Obviously, it,s a tragedy. I think, obviously, the great tragedy happened 15 years ago when this young woman was stricken in this way.

"My view is that there are other and better ways to decide this than Congress. So, I,m very clear. I don,t know what to do. This is not a decision I should be making for the individuals or the family, and neither should my colleagues. And, that,s my problem.

"Congress steps in and passes a law that overturns everything the Florida courts did, really quite extraordinary. And tries to make a judgment based on old facts.

"And to answer your question from before, if Congress had gotten more specific, this was the dilemma the drafters had. If they had gotten more specific and kind of gave orders to the court, it would almost certainly have been found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court."