Bill Frenzel, Minnesota Republican and fiscal authority in the U.S. House, dies at 86

Bill Frenzel, a Minnesota Republican who became a prominent congressional authority on federal budget and international trade issues during 20 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, died Monday at his home in McLean, Virginia. He was 86.

The cause was cancer, said a daughter, Pam Lindon.

Frenzel was an executive at his family's warehousing operation and served in the Minnesota House of Representatives before winning an open congressional seat in 1970. He represented his district in the Twin Cities suburbs until 1990, when he declined to seek re-election.

By then he had become dean of the Minnesota delegation, ranking Republican on the House Budget committee and an influential member of the tax-writing Ways and Means committee. On both sides of the aisle, he was admired for his deeply researched positions on complicated fiscal matters.

"Loud and brainy, partisan and thoughtful, he puts his stamp on every debate in which he participates," read his profile in the Almanac of American Politics.

Among Frenzel's principal legislative interests were promoting free trade and balanced budgets. He helped negotiate the major 1990 deficit-reduction deal, a significant achievement at a time when Frenzel had become increasingly frustrated by what he described as the Republican Party's "seemingly permanent minority."

Democrats "think they were born to be kings," Congressional Quarterly quoted him as saying, "and that there's a servant class, and that's the Republicans."

In an effort to invigorate his party, Frenzel nominated Newt Gingrich for party whip, a position that the Georgia Republican won in 1989.

Gingrich's fiery style contrasted with Frenzel's more moderate one, but Frenzel said he had concluded that the party "needed to take some risks." In 1994 -- four years after Frenzel's retirement -- Gingrich led the GOP to recapturing control of the House.

Frenzel remained involved in public affairs, including in the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton. Clinton tapped Frenzel as an adviser on the North American Free Trade Agreement, a centerpiece of the president's first-term agenda, and tasked him with helping rally GOP support.

"I took a position up in the Rayburn Building and I think I met with every member of the Republican caucus," Frenzel told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "The idea was to get the vote nailed down before you bring the bill to the floor. Some of the members were difficult and slippery."

He continued, "For instance, some of the members said, 'We don't think the Mexicans know anything.' We flew them to Mexico City and had them meet with President [Carlos] Salinas and his cabinet, who, of course, were all University of Chicago PhDs and who bowled them over. That was very effective." NAFTA was passed in 1993 and enacted the next year.

Frenzel later served under George W. Bush, a Republican, and Barack Obama, a Democrat, on advisory commissions on Social Security and trade policy. He was a guest scholar with the Brookings Institution think tank for more than two decades and was a co-chairman of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Government, both based in Washington.

Years after he left office, he remained sought after for his insider's perspective on politics.

"Republicans used to be interested in not running continual rivers of red ink," he told The New York Times in 2012. "If that meant raising taxes a little bit, we always raised taxes a little bit. But nowadays taxes are like leprosy and they can't be used for anything, and so Republicans have denied themselves any bargaining power."

William Eldridge Frenzel was born July 31, 1928, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received a bachelor's degree in 1950 and a master's degree in business administration the following year, both from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. After Navy service during the Korean War, he joined his family's business in Minnesota.

In Congress, he helped formulate campaign-finance laws regulations and pushed for stronger oversight of congressional franking, or mailing, privileges.

Survivors include his wife of 63 years, Ruthy Purdy Frenzel of McLean, Virginia; three daughters, Debby Frenzel of Maple Grove, Minnesota, Pam Lindon of Orlando, Florida, and Mitty Frenzel of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina; two brothers; and two grandchildren.

Throughout his career, in and out of office, Frenzel sought cooperation between the parties.

Republicans will "exact justice, whatever justice is,"