Congress Quietly Repeals Congressional Insider Trading Ban

[ProSense]

29. More:

The Senate voted Thursday to kill broad disclosure of already public reports detailing the personal finances of public officials and employees.

The STOCK Act, which was passed by Congress a year ago, requires online posting of the personal financial disclosure statements that lawmakers and congressional candidates, the president and vice president, members of the cabinet and high-ranking congressional and executive branch staff file each year. The data is supposed to be made available in machine readable format that is to be ready to download this October.

The law's provision barring insider trading by members of Congress was left intact.

With no hearings or notice to the public or to most members of the body, the Senate voted by unanimous consent to remove both the online disclosure requirement for staff members on the Hill and in executive branch agencies and the creation of a public database containing the information within the reports. Roll Call reports that "neither the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee nor its House counterpart seemed to have specifics on what was in the works."

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/04/senate-guts-stock-act.html

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The STOCK Act’s history has been one of knee-jerk reactions rather than reasoned decision-making. Yesterday’s vote proved no different, with Senators overreacting and taking a hatchet to the law when a scalpel would do.

The bill enacted last year would require already public financial disclosures of senior congressional and executive branch officials to be put online in order to prevent or root out insider trading. There were concerns that some provisions of the bill were overbroad and would put some government employees at risk. Rather than craft narrow exemptions, or even delay implementation until proper protections could be created, the Senate decided instead to exclude legislative and executive staffers from the online disclosure requirements.

The sweeping exemption goes even farther than critics of the disclosure requirements requested. For those to whom online disclosure would still apply (the president, vice president, members of Congress, congressional candidates and individuals subject to Senate confirmation) the Senate bill made electronic filing of the information optional and struck the requirement that online information be searchable, sortable and downloadable, making even the disclosures that remain in the bill tepid and relatively unusable.

Not only does the change undermine the intent of the original bill to ensure government insiders are not profiting from non-public information (if anyone thinks high level congressional staffers don’t have as much or more insider information than their bosses, they should spend some time on Capitol Hill) but it sets an extraordinarily dangerous precedent suggesting that any risks stem not from information being public but from public information being online.

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http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/04/12/epic-failure-by-the-senate-on-transparency-provisions-in-stock-act/

Again, we need to find out why Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley, Bernie Sanders and/or Elizabeth Warren didn't object to this. All it takes is one Senator to object.