Thursday, December 1, 2011

Apparently Congress does feel shame

I guess there is even an amount of public intrusion and knowledge into their secret lives that will make Congress at least try to give the impression of acting responsibly. Peter Schweizer's book "Throw Them all Out" apparently caused enough of a problem for congressional image that a Democrat from NY none the less introduced a bill called the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act and already has 127 cosponsors.



According to the WaPo similar bills are being introduced in the Senate by Scott Brown and Kirsten Gillibrand, which makes us wonder why all of a sudden are Democrats so interested in how congressional image is.

If I sound a little cynical its because I am.I haven't read the bill, so I don't know how all the language works in it. However I find it hard to believe that it would pass if there weren't multiple loopholes. One I can see already is that any deal worth more that 1000 has to be reported within 90 days. Now they will just do multiple trades of 900. And why 90 days? Why not 5 or 10? Are they trying to say that it's not possible to report stock trades in that amount of time?

Either way I won't be impressed until a bill is passed with no loop holes that forces all elected officials to put all their investments into a blind trust just like POTUS.

No comments:

Post a Comment